It's probably easy, but how do I make it random?

programming flash
1

I’ve got an XML menu, followed the squirrel tutorial and modified the code to suit what I was doing (a news page). Now I’m wanting to generate a single random news entry from this XML document, but I can’t work out how to do it at all!!

I’m guessing the answer is to change something in here, but everything I’ve tried hasn’t worked out so far :frowning:

function CreateMenu(menu_xml) {
    // start with the first item in the XML
    var items = menu_xml.firstChild.firstChild.childNodes;
    for (var i=0; i<items.length; i++) {
        // only continue if the type of this item is news
        if (items*.attributes.type == "news") { 
            // create variables for our elements
            var date = items*.childNodes[0]; // first child node
            var newsTitle = items*.childNodes[1]; // second child node
            var moreInfo = items*.childNodes[2]; // third child node
                        
            // Create a menu item movieclip in the menuMC instance on the main timeline
            // for each item element offsetting each additional further down the screen
            var itemMC = menuMC.attachMovie("menu_item","item"+item_count, item_count);
            itemMC._y = item_count * item_spacing;
            item_count++;
            
            // assign text using nodeValue to get the text from the text nodes
            itemMC.date_txt.text = date.firstChild.nodeValue;
            itemMC.newsTitle_txt.text = newsTitle.firstChild.nodeValue;
            itemMC.mainBtn.title_txt = newsTitle.firstChild.nodeValue;
            itemMC.mainBtn.story_txt = moreInfo.firstChild.nodeValue;
            // when itemMC is pressent, calls DisplayInfo function
            itemMC.mainBtn.onRelease = DisplayInfo;
        }
    }
}

Any help would be appreciated :slight_smile:

Cheers, Chris