What is the equivilant of C#'s generic Dictionary in ActionScript 3?

Question

I want to have a collection of objects, which will be of a class I created called Server. A Server has a string property which is it's IP address, as well as many other pieces of data and objects.

I will have methods for adding and removing servers to this collection, and there will be a need to find a server by it's IP address occasionally. If I were doing this in C# I would use a Dictionary< where the IP string would be the key and the Server object would be the value. I could easily check to see if an item exists in the Dictionary before attempting to add it.

So my requirements are: 1. Ability to add items to the collection (I don't care where they go, front, back, middle) 2. Ability to remove items from anywhere in the collection. 3. Ability to determine if a particular IP address already exists in the collection. 4. Ability to get a reference to a Server object by it's IP. Edit: Oh yes, I would like it to be strongly typed like the Vector... I guess it's not absolutely necesary, but would be nice.

So it seems like an associative arrays will give me what I need, except I'm not sure about how to do #3 or #4.

public var Servers:Object = new Object( );

public function AddServer(server:Server):void
{
   //TODO:need to check if it exists first and throw an error if so
   //(it's the caller's responsibility to call DoesServerExist first)

   Servers[server.IP] = server;
}


public function RemoveServer(IP:string):void
{
   //is it OK to attempt to delete an item if it doesn't already exist?
   //do I need to check if it exists before doing delete?
   delete Servers[IP];
}

public function DoesServerExist(IP:string):bool
{  
    //Do I loop through all the elements testing it's IP property?
    //Or can I just do something like this?
    if(Servers[IP] == null)
    {
        return false;
    }
    else
    {
        return true;
    }
}

public function GetServer(IP:string):Server
{
    return Servers[IP];//what is returned if this IP doesn't exist?
}

Answer 1

You can just use an array. Example:

var dict:Array = [];
var ip = "164.157.012.122"
dict[ip] = "Server name"

if (dict[ip] == "Server name"){
    trace("Yay");
}

//membership
if (dict[ip]){
    trace(ip + " is a member of dict");
} else {
    trace (ip + " is not a member");
}

//removal:
dict[ip] = null;

AS3 does not really have a built in Dictionary class, unfortunately.

Answer 2

Call me goofy, but why not use the Dictionary class? That gets you everything except strong typing.

If you want strong typing then I'd say you need a custom container, which wraps up a Vector of Servers, and a Dictionary or associative array of IP strings that indexes into the Vector. Then you'd need to expose methods for access, test, insert and remove.