Before we get into the Flash side we would need to build our XML list of states. Even though I've done it for you already (see download), this is how we'd code it from scratch:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<items>
  <item id="1" lbl="AL" />
  <item id="2" lbl="AR" />
  <item id="3" lbl="AK" />
  <item id="4" lbl="AZ" />
  <item id="5" lbl="CA" />
</items>


Basic XML stuff here. We're going to take advantage of the "attributes" properties of our child nodes because, as you'll see, they make traversing XML trees a lot easier in Flash.