Try this, and have a look at my collmenu abstraction. (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/288305/St.ools%20for%205.zip) The help file shows a way to fill the coll, though it was intended to do the opposite, fill a menu with the contents of a coll...:

yeah that gets me part of the way there but how do I request the index number by sending the file name? That is the big question for me right now. I was using bits of the VPS tutorial that populate poly movie instances with file names of a folder and the umenu is a coll of sorts being that it has index numbers. but the big drawback is when writing a cueing structure for a show, you want to reference the poly instances by the file they are holding rather than there target number because if you insert a new cue in the show folder, it disrupts the target order of the poly instances when they are loaded each day because the index numbers are derived from alphabetical order. Once you insert a cue, all the cue's after now have index numbers that are one off and the rest of the show is in the wrong media file. When I design a show of my own, I know how to adhere to the naming conventions to make this work regardless but I want it to be more robust and not have to think much about target order and just say "play this file" and have a list or coll that then retrieves the target number of the poly holding that file. Here is the population mechanism i am using now which is a snag from the VPS with minor mods. I have been firing off poly's with the menu or sending selection ints to the menu. I really want to maintain this loading method rather than go to a read per cue method because of the background read glitch in jitter.

wow sometimes its the simple things. just send a message to umenu of "symbol (name of file)" and it spits out the index number that contains that symbol. PERFECT! Thanks for the dialog Stef and thanks Cyc 74!

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