Please help! Loading variables into a nested movie!

ok, i'm no programmer but i'm trying to learn flash at the moment and am having problems with a dynamic button i've created. the button is a movie clip (instance name: list_item) with 2 frames. each frame has a dynamic text field named with variable "name". the only difference between the 2 text fileds is colour (frame 1 is black, frame 2 is red). this is setup to create a mouseover effect so that the text will change colour each time a button is hovered over. a button is created on a seperate layer that spans both frames with the following actions:

on (rollOver) {
gotoAndStop(2);
}
on (rollOut, releaseOutside) {
gotoAndStop (1);
}

this movie is then nested in the root movie if that makes any senese. the action in frame 1 loads an external text file as follows:

loadVariablesNum("text.txt", 0);

the text file contains the following:
&list_item.name=This is my text button

when i publish the movie it loads the variable into the nested movie at frame 1 but when mouseover event occurs the variable disappears when going to frame 2 of the nested movie. onrelease the text also fails to reappear.

can someone please explain what's going on? i've been going nuts trying to solve this.

using flash MX??

not sure about the

&list_item.name
notation

and its always simpler to store variables in the main timeline so you can reference them from anywhere without resorting to
_parent._parent._parent etc!

also the way you are going about it seems a bit kludgy to me - better to use a movie clip as a button and define the actions on the movieclip, setting variables that are loaded into the main timeline (_root)

you can either change frames inside the clip to represent different states (like the way a button works) or apply a colour change to the properties of the text field.

(uses frame change method, since i think the text field transform uses to much code for such a simple requirement)

hope this helps

thanks m8 but i seem unable to download it (access denied). in anycase the problem still remains when i try and insert the variables into the main timeline (_root).

u can download my script here. it has been built in flash 6 but for the life of me i can't figure out what the problem is.

download seems to work ok from here....if u send a mail to me with a response email i'll send it (this site doesnt show me your mail)

opened yours up, but theres too much going on in it - havent got time to go thru it

i cant understand why you cant access the variables unless its the way you are referencing them - i see that you are using 'telltarget' which is deprecated, and a pain in the butt to use....use dot notation throughout - could be the problem.

be careful using 'this' - if its done on the main timeline then you are effectively saying '_root.'

just guessing, i'll try and have a look later - mail me re file

thanks m8. my e-mail address is mail@banzaiuk.com

i've tried everything i can think of and i agree it does appear to be a referencing problem. the interesting thing is the variables are intially loaded but when a mouseover event occurs over the movieclip, instead of changing the variables text colour (occurs in frame 2 of the nested movie) it just disappears. more significantly the initial variable is lost when rollout event occurs (by default this should return to the text field in frame 1 of the nested movie from which the initial variable was loaded). in short as soon as any mouseover/rollout/etc event occurs the variables vanish.

it's a bit hard to explain but is simpler when you're looking at the FLA. i would appreciate if u could have a look at it since i've been trying for weeks to get this to work. if u have any questions then please e-mail me.

on a siednote the movie is essentially trying do the following:

- generate a menu with submenus
- the menu & submenu variables are displayed using just 1 text field.
- the movie parses the variables to distinguish menu & submenu arrays & duplicates them according to their variable name. e.g.

item0client="Menu Item 0";
item0name="Sub-menu 0";
item1client="Menu Item 1";
item1name="Sub-menu 1";

and so on...