Globals in as3

Hi,

I have a flash site which is going to have a concertina menu and various other features. I need to know if the menu is active or inactive so am using a Global variables class to do this. I have a couple of questions.

(i) is this a legitimate technique, to have globals to store and share the state of the menu between all my classes(active or inactive)

(ii) What should (if anything) the globals class extend?

Also I create my global like this

package

{

public class MyGlobal

{

public var test:String;

}

}

And in my main timeline try and set it with

import MyGlobal;
test =“hello”;

But get 1120: Access of undefined property test.

Thanks.