targeting movie clips in container mcs

[denise]

Hi -- newbie here, so I apologize for my ignorance.  I'm having some trouble with targeting my movie clip instances from the buttons.  They are on the stage in container movie clips and I read in another post that this might be the issue.  This is my button action code:
on (release) {
   _root.cont1.movieclipinstance.gotoAndStop("play");
   EcardSelect = "1";
}
Re setting the variables -- each clip regardless of where it is in the main swf must have a new variable number, right?  

Any help you may offer is greatly appreciated since Flash seems to have consumed months of my life and my progress is so extremely slow!

Thanks again!  denise

[Flash-db]

Ok, I'm not sure If I'm reading this right but here goes:

You'll have to specify where the variable goes as well - one way to do this would be:

on (release) {
   _root.cont1.movieclipinstance.gotoAndStop("play");
   _root.cont1.movieclipinstance.EcardSelect = "1";
}

Or from the MovieClipInstance you can grab the EcardSelect variable from the Root timeline for example:  

EcardSelect = _root.EcardSelect
(This will make the EcardSelect variable local inside the movie clip you are using).  

Another way to do this is with Tell Target - Tell Target can be very helpful in certain situations but you can just as easily specify everything by it's full path:

an example of this would be:

on (release) {
   tellTarget ("_root.cont1.movieclipinstance") {
       gotoAndStop("play");
       EcardSelect = "1";
   }
}

Tell target basically specify's a movie clip then makes all actions contained in within the brackets local to that movie clip.

I'm still a bit confused on this question - so If their's anything else let me know.