Passing data to a partial in standard-layout

My problem is fairly straightforward. All my web pages share
standard-layout.rhtml. This layout renders a set of links in the footer
of the page using a partial. I want these links to be dependent upon
which controller and action is being called. To this end, I want a
given action on a controller to be able to place into an array a set of
objects, each of which contains information for rendering a link. My
question is, how do I get make that array available to
standard-layout.rhtml? I know that I can place methods in a helper and
these are available to the layout, but I need the data to come from an
action.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Kevin

instance variables set in your action are available in your layout (n
the same way that they are accessible from the rhtml file for your
action.

Fred