Hi Ben or anyone else who would like to help, I tried to incorporate your suggestions, but I think I still am missing the whole idea about an array collection.
in one part of my code, I have done the following for each (var item:XML in locationData){ var ff:formField = new formField(); ff.labelText = item..callLocation_DisplayName; ff.callLocationId = item..callLocation_id; ff.allowableDataFlag = item..deptCategory; ff.callSelectedDate = mysqlDate.format(calendarSelector.selectedDate); callLabelCollection.addItem(ff); addChild(ff); } This runs through the loop a total of 16 times to build my array collection. Now in a custom event handler, when the user selects a given date, I query a new table to determine who is scheduled in any of these 16 locations on the selected date. What I need to do now is to set another parameter of the custom component based on the callLocationId that I set in my array collection. So for this I have 2 questions 1) how do I access the array at a given callLocationId from the array collection above? for this I have tried var someFF:formField = callLabelCollection.getItemIndex(item..callLocation_id) as formField; but am not getting any results and 2) how do I now add additional fields to this array to the array collection? Thanks for any help Don