Nested loops with XML data

programming flash
1

I’m trying to build a musicians site. I’m populating menus, the musicians page, and some other stuff with XML. I need help with getting all the attributes (of the artists CD) for each artist. Here’s one artist entry in my XML file:


<ARTISTS>
<ARTIST>
	 <NAME>AP.9 FED-X</NAME>
<ALBUMS>
<CD title="Of The Mob Figgaz" image="images/next_img1.jpg" />
<CD title="just a test" image="images/cd1.jpg" />
<CD title="another test II" image="images/cd2.jpg" />
</ALBUMS>
 
<ARTISTIMAGES>
<IMAGE url="images/artist1.jpg" />
</ARTISTIMAGES>
 
<BUY url="[http://dablackmarket.com](http://dablackmarket.com/)" />
<BIO text="AP.9 &amp; FED-X are two brothas from Lorem ipsum blah blah blah." />
<NEWS text="Some news goes here" />
</ARTIST>
</ARTISTS>

So far I have like 5 artist that I loop through and setup the essential variables, name, bio, news. What is the best way for me to create a nice little discography column on my artist page? Here’s my main function that parses this XML data:


function buildMenu(xmlData){ 
artists = xmlData.firstChild.childNodes; 
artist_bios = new Array();
artist_names = new Array();
 
for (i=0; i<artists.length; i++) { 
names = artists*.firstChild.firstChild.nodeValue;
//Here I dynamically create the menu
item_mc = list_mc.attachMovie("menu_item","item"+item_count, item_count); 
item_mc._y = item_count * item_spacing; 
item_count++; 
item_mc.artist_names_txt.text = names;
//Here I'm creating an array that I may or may not use later, don't know what i was thinking.
artist_names* = artists*.firstChild.firstChild.nodeValue;
//Nested loop to try and get the CD name and image for each artist, don't know what I'm doing
for (j=0;j<artists*.firstChild.childNodes.length;j++){
	//trace(artists*.firstChild.childNodes[j].attributes.title);
	//trying to attach this data somewhere, but this isn't working
	item_mc.menu_item_btn[CDList[j]] = artists*.firstChild.childNodes[j].attributes.title;
	item_mc.menu_item_btn.cdImg[j] = artists*.firstChild.childNodes.attributes.image;
 
}
//setup the variables for the artists page, this works
item_mc.menu_item_btn.numCDs = artists*.firstChild.childNodes.length;
item_mc.menu_item_btn.bio_text = artists*.childNodes[4].attributes.text;
item_mc.menu_item_btn.news_text = artists*.lastChild.attributes.text;
item_mc.menu_item_btn.name_text = artists*.firstChild.firstChild.nodeValue;
item_mc.menu_item_btn.onRelease = PlayArtist;
} 
}

Yeah, I don’t know how to handle several CDs for each artist. I can see I need a nested loop, but do I store those CD attributes in an array, or create a variable like some_mc[“CDLIST”+j] ???

Then I gotta think about building the discography movieclip. I’ll worry about that later.
What I got working so far is at http://dablackmarket.com/stage/main.swf