Remember the monkey that kept typing, and eventually he wrote a Shakespeare Sonnet? That would be me. Finally cracked this, though I give full credit to the law of odds.
There were three things that I hadn't done in the above scenario . . . two kind-of-obvious, and one not-so-obvious.
First the not-so-obvious:
My goal was to dynamically create a list of menu items via a single prefab menu item, as part of an NGUI scrollable panel. Jean had suggested that I needed to instantiate the prefab before I could use the NGUI Tools Add Grid Child action, which was probably correct . . . but what I didn't realize is that this could be handled right from within the action. There is an option for a thing called "Child Instance", which I had left unused. MISTAKE! Because this is the "hook" into the currently iterated instance of the prefab (this was all happening via a GetNext loop of Hashtable entries). So what must have been happening is the "identity" of the prefab was getting lost somehow, without a direct reference (e.g. the instantiation itself, I guess) to the object.
Jean, I'm not so sure that this is what you meant by instantiation, but I did find this thread over on the Tasheran site, where Aron Mook actually says that using the NGUI Add Child method is the way to go . . .
http://www.tasharen.com/forum/index.php?topic=11208.0The other two missing pieces were pretty stupid on my part . . . having added the Child to the list, I forgot that I had to then FindChild, and get the Label component that belonged to it, so that I could then set the Label's text property (via a global variable set to Unity.object>GUI Label).
Anyway, that took care of it, and it only took me FOUR DAYS to figure it out. Sheesh. But onward and upward from here.
As a side point, I'll also say that there isn't a whole lot of reference material out there on dynamically instantiating prefabs in PM, and while I'm still not sure if this is *the* way, it certainly is *a* way, and I'm happy to share more detail if anyone wants it.
Sleeping much better now . . .
Cheers