Dictionary in Flex/ActionScript

actionscript-3apache-flexdictionary

Is there any way to implement a dictionary with ActionScript in a Flex application.
For example, I want to store something like this.

public var orientation:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection([
    {a: new Direction('0','0','b','0')},
    {b: new Direction('a','c','0','h')},
    {c: new Direction('0','b','d','e')},
    {d: new Direction('c','0','0','0')},
    {e: new Direction('f','g','0','c')},
    {f: new Direction('0','0','e','0')},
    {g: new Direction('0','0','0','e')},
    {h: new Direction('0','b','0','i')},
    {i: new Direction('l','h','j','m')},
    {j: new Direction('i','k','0','0')},
    {k: new Direction('0','0','0','j')},
    {l: new Direction('0','0','i','0')},
    {m: new Direction('0','i','0','0')}
]);

So that instead of 

orientation.getItemAt(3).north

I could go something like 

orientation.getItemAt('d')north

Without getting the following error

Implicit coercion of a value of type String to an unrelated type int.

Thank You for your help

Best Answer

This is quite a strange structure you are using. Why not directly use a Dictionary?

var orientation:Dictionary = new Dictionary();
orientation["a"] = new Direction('0','0','b','0');
orientation["b"] = new Direction('a','c','0','h');
// etc.

Then you can access the value directly by key - trace(orientation["a"]).

If you really have to use the current structure, you could create a custom function to access items the way you want. Something like that should work (untested):

function getItemByKey(var array:ArrayCollection, var key:String):* {
    for (var i:int = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
        var item:* = array[i];
        if (item[key]) return item;
    }
    return null;
}
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