Searching a complex ArrayCollection in Flex and how I hate the damn IViewCursor

I'll preface this post as I do many by stating that I'm relatively new to Actionscript and Flex so I'm not really sure if the code I present here is a solution or a hack. In either case it works.

While building a 'Save Game' feature for my Sudoku game I was came across a situation where I needed to search an existing ArrayCollection for the ID of a previously saved game. I knew what the ID was but just needed to locate it's index position in the collection. While looking at the Flex documentation I noticed that the ArrayCollection component has a nice method called getItemIndex. However this wasn't going to be any use to me because getItemIndex only finds exact matches of an entire object and I needed to match only a single value. This lead me to look into the use of an IViewCursor.

While creating a cursor to access and manipulate and ArrayCollection seems like an intuitive concept trying to understand how to use it frankly makes my head spin. So instead I just wrote a simple function. If someone can tell me why using an IViewCursor is better or easier than the following function I would like to hear it ( and see an example ).

// returns the index position of object with matching usid value
private function usidSearch( usid:Number, coll:ArrayCollection ):Number
{
var o:Object;
for ( var i:Number = 0; i<coll.length; i++){
 o = coll.getItemAt(i);
 if( o.usid == usid) return i;
}
return -1;
}