Access to unidentified property

programming flash
1

i know this is all over the forums everywhere but i cannot find my answer anywhere! so i did my entire website in as 2.0 and i would like to upgrage, but as 3.0 is driving me crazy. ive been googling for 3 days. i hope someone can help.

so i have my gallery.fla and my document class named gallery and i have another class called buttons which i would like to add several buttons with a loop from an xml file, where the xml places a name inside a text box that is inside a movie clip linkage name button, but base class name buttons. so im just testing it and i add my button to the stage and then try to place text inside the dynamic text box, but i keep getting the 1120:Access to unidentified property btn for the line btn.btnName_txt = “testing” but i just added this object to the stage??? i even wrapped it inside of an event listener to make sure that the movieclip was on the stage. still the same thing. AND if i write btn.btnName_txt.text = “testing” i get: TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.at gallery$iinit(). but i get no compiler error…this is from the output window. here is my code:

gallery.as

package 
{
    import caurina.transitions.*;
    import Thumbnail;
    import flash.xml.*;
    import flash.display.Sprite;
    import flash.display.MovieClip;
    import flash.text.*;
    import flash.events.*;
    import buttons;

    public class gallery extends MovieClip 
    {
        public function gallery() 
        {
          var btnName:String;
          var btn:buttons = new buttons();
          addChild(btn);
          btn.x = 100;
          btn.y = 100;
         btn.btnName_txt = "testing";
         }
     }
}

buttons.as:

package 
{
    import caurina.transitions.*;
    import flash.xml.*;
    import flash.display.Sprite;
    import flash.display.MovieClip;
    import flash.text.*;
    import flash.events.*;

    public class buttons extends MovieClip 
    {
        public function buttons() 
        {
          this.buttonMode = true;
          this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, showGalBtns)
         }
          function showGalBtns(event:MouseEvent):void 
          {
            trace("this btn works");
           }
      }
}

and the movie clip im trying to add is linkage name button with base class buttons and the dynamic text box inside of it is instance name btnName_txt.

thanks so much for reading all of this…