I am working on creating a project which allows me to define objects in an XML document and have flash create the required items and display at run time. Needless to say, it is slow progress making this up and learning as I go along.
I have now reached a hurdle, which by comparison should be really easy. But I'm drawing a blank. Despite spending several hours with my good friend Google, I don't seem to be able to phrase this in such as way as to find other people who want to achieve the same.
Description
Currently I have a menu handling class, which is where the issue lays. An instance of the menuHandler class is created. It is used by calling a class (LoadFramework) which is passed two strings. One is the address of an XML file, the other is a tag within that XML document to specify what part of it needs to be read.
The XML document is loaded by a class and then parsed into a variable. Then depending on the second string passed (the value of the XML tag), the appropriate part of that XML document is translated onto the screen. This all works fine, but here is the catch...
The only way I have managed to get this working is to use a switch statement with a case for every potential tag. Then I write an appropriate for-each-in loop. The following is an example of one of the case statements (they are all identical except for the "event.dat.XYZ.element" part). "event.dat" is a variable passed by a custom handler, it contains the XML data. XYZ is the name of the tag (in this case "home") and each "element" is a tag containing an attribute.
An example of the XML that is held in event.datPass.
The Request
What I want to do is replace part or all of the object in the for-each-in loop with a variable, and then evaluate the string as a reference rather than using it as the value.
So that I can end up ditching the switch and simply have something like:
mnVariable would contain the string, eg "event.datPass.home.element".
Or:
mnVariable would contain the string, eg "home".
However, written the first way, all that happens is that the for-each-in loop looks in mnVariable to find the value in menuField, which it won't find. Written the second way it will just throw an error. I need [mnVariable] to be used to evaluate as meaning 'look in the object named by this string'
Any pointers are very gladly received.