Passing model data from table to detail controller

I have a fairly simple Alloy app that gets data from a server and puts it in a collection, which is then displayed in a TableView. That all works fine, but now I need to implement the detail controller which obviously opens up a new window on clicking one of the rows to show more detailed information.

The main view looks something like this:

<Alloy>
    <Collection src="project" />
    <Window id="projectsWin" class="container" title="My projects">
 
        <TableView dataCollection="project">
            <TableViewRow hasChild="true" onClick="viewProject">
                <View class="projectRow">
                    <Label class="projectId" text="{project_id}" />
                    <Label class="projectClient" text="{client_name}" />
                    <Label class="projectAddress" text="{address}" />
                </View>
            </TableViewRow>
        </TableView>
 
    </Window>
</Alloy>

And in the controller:

function viewProject(e) {
 
    Alloy.createController('detail', {
        project_id: e.row.children[0].children[0].text,
        client_name: e.row.children[0].children[1].text,
        address: e.row.children[0].children[2].text
    }).getView().open();
 
}

The function obviously sends the values of the text properties of the labels to the detail controller, but it seems like a very poor way to do it.

Is it possible to instead send a reference to the model as the single argument to the controller so that the data can be retrieved from the database rather than being sent directly from the main controller?