So essentially, I could populate an XML document from the database with all the pertinent external-to-flash information and import it as an array. Then upon creating an Offices object, it would loop through the array and create an MC "button" for each office inside a Movie Clip called officeMovieClip (to reference your code) with a matching id. Then inside my "button" class under rollOver and rollOut methods I could just use the ID of the button to reference the data array and get the corresponding data into my tool tip (this is what the button was doing originally).

That sounds like a good plan as far as the static data goes, but there's still an issue of getting the occupant's dynamic messenger status. It's currently set up to call upon a PHP file with an office number and expects a code and message response. Ideally, it should refresh when the floor is loaded and then every 30 seconds after that or when the office is rolledOver or clicked.

It should be easy enough to get the individual actions to work inside the "button" onRollOvers and onReleases, but I'm somewhat weary of the overall refreshes, or even the initialization of all the offices. I'm having trouble seeing how to implement that.

I suppose in the end we could just not worry about the complete refreshes and just focus on the initialization and the single actions... I could ask my coworker to have his API populate an XML file with all the initial statuses and have it update it every so often, so that when the individual buttons are interacted with, they can read in new data from the XML file.

Is there an easy way to refresh the data array?