Passing a parameter between flash movies

Question

I have a flash movie for drop down menus that is called by all flash/movie banner sections of my site. The banner movies use FlashVars to set the heading and an image. The trouble is that the flash menus also were set to use a flashvar to dictate the context of the menus and leave one top level menu highlighted to show the content to the user.
I have not been able to get both of them to use the Flashvars functionality. The html page calls the banner movie directly and it can therefore access the Flashvars. The menu swf however - which is not called from the html page but instead is called from within the banner movie - cannot access the flashvars variables. That leaves me with two choices:
1. Either use a different method for passing the context variable to the menu movie.
2. HTML code calls the banner movie. I can continue using flashvars and get the context variable by reading it from within the banner movie - and then somehow pass the value down to the menu movie if that is possible.
Far greater AS coders than me frequent this site and I'm hoping one of you can suggest how to get this done...
Thanks yet again,
Sam

Answer 1

right, in the banner swf you've got something like:
// use this to set a default value just in case
var contextValue= 0;
// now set it to the flashVar
contextValue= root.loaderInfo.parameters.contextFlashvar;
then pass the var you create into the menuswf -- see the red bit below:
// create loader and ask it to load something
var myLoader:Loader = new Loader();
myLoader.load(new URLRequest("swfFolder/mySwf.swf"));
//add listeners to the loader
myLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, handleComplete);
myLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, handleProgress);
myLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, handleError);
function handleComplete(event:Event){
     // give the loaded swf a reference -- name of the loaded file means nothing to flash file
     var westview_menus = myLoader.content as MovieClip;
   // now use that reference to set vars
     westview_menus.context = contextValue;
     addChild(westview_menus);
function handleProgress(event:ProgressEvent):void{
    //progress handler stuff
function handleError(event:IOErrorEvent):void{
    // error handler