About absolute and relative target paths

You can use ActionScript to send messages from one Timeline to another. The Timeline that contains the action is called the controlling Timeline, and the Timeline that receives the action is called the target Timeline. For example, there could be an action on the last frame of one Timeline that tells another Timeline to play. To refer to a target Timeline, you must use a target path, which indicates the location of a movie clip in the display list.

Here is the hierarchy of a document named westCoast on level 0, which contains three movie clips: california, oregon, and washington. Each of these movie clips in turn contains two movie clips:

_level0
    westCoast
        california
            sanfrancisco
            bakersfield
        oregon
            portland
            ashland
        washington
            olympia
            ellensburg

Just as on a web server, each Timeline in Flash can be addressed in two ways: with an absolute path or with a relative path. The absolute path of an instance is always a full path from a level name, regardless of which Timeline calls the action; for example, the absolute path to the instance california is _level0.westCoast.california. A relative path is different when called from different locations; for example, the relative path to california from sanfrancisco is _parent, but from portland, it's _parent._parent.california.