Design Portal Page Objects

I have a portal page with a formlet and DME object.  When I inquire on the form I get the DME to refresh correctly.  The DME rows have checkboxes where the user can select 1 or multiple rows.  I want to gather information from the selected rows and pass values from the form to a processflow trigger.  To do this I put a button on the form but this is where I'm having problems.  The script tied to the button doesn't seem to find the DME object and errors on page. I put an alert just to see if it was getting past objDME and it never does.  Can a formlet script see the portal page object?  Am I missing a step?  Any guidance would be appreciated.

function request_OnClick()
{
 var vLineNbr = "";
 var objDME=page.objects["attestationpo1a"];
 alert("Found Object");
 aRows = objDME.getCheckedRows();
 var loop = aRows.length;
 
 if (loop == 0)
 {
  return true;
 }
 
 for (var i=0;i  {
  vLineNbr = objDME.getValue("LINE-NBR",aRows[i]) + "|";
 }
 
 alert (vLineNbr);
 return true;
}

Thanks Robert