External classes problems

1

Hi there,

I am currently learning AS3 and have a whale of a time! (hmmm)

Anyway, I am trying to create an external class that will load external text into a movie, so I can re-use this again and again. So I have a flash movie with a textField in it with an instance name of exText_txt.

In the fla I have the following actionscript to load the new class and put the text and cssfile into it:

import bobcooper.ExternalText;

var cssPath:String = "css/flashStyles.css";
var exampleText:String = "<h1>This is a headline</h1>" + "This is a line of text. <span class=\"bluetext\">" + "This line of text is colored blue.</span>";

var externalText:ExternalText = new ExternalText(exampleText, cssPath);
	
externalText.getTextFile(null);

I then have an as file called ExternalText.as with the following code:

package bobcooper
{
    import flash.display.*;
    import flash.events.Event;
    import flash.net.URLLoader;
    import flash.net.URLRequest;
    import flash.text.StyleSheet;
    import flash.text.TextField;
    import flash.text.TextFieldAutoSize;

    public class ExternalText 
    {
        var loader:URLLoader;
        var exampleText:String;
		var cssPath:String;

        public function ExternalText(et:String, cp:String):void
        {
			exampleText = et;
			cssPath = cp;
		}
		
		public function getTextFile(e:Event):void{
           
            var req:URLRequest = new URLRequest(cssPath);

            loader = new URLLoader();
            loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onCSSFileLoaded);
            loader.load(req);
        }

        public function onCSSFileLoaded(event:Event):void
        {
            var sheet:StyleSheet = new StyleSheet();
            sheet.parseCSS(loader.data);
            exText_txt.styleSheet = sheet;
            exText_txt.htmlText = exampleText;
			
        }
    }
}

However I keep on getting the following error:

1120: Access of undefined property exText_txt.

So what I need to know is how / where do I define exText_txt?

Eventually the plan is to have the textfield within a movieclip on the stage so I can mask it and scroll it etc, so I would also like to know how to reference a movieclip from an external class.

Thanks for your help,

Bob