While working on partly connected system using flex technology I figured out quick enough that working with large data sets (thousands of records) is not applicable. Especially because i held a number of those sets which I needed to  cross reference in number of occasions.

My solution was to create an indexed collection which i can benefit both worlds of Dictionary and ArrayCollection , with that in mind I designed and implemented the IndexedArrayCollection.

The collection extends ArrayCollection and adds the capability of indexing a single member of an object in the collection (I assume that each element is an object).

IndexArrayCollection constructor receives two arguments first is a source array and second is the index field name (attribute name).