Comparing XML nodes of the same name with E4X

I recently found a situation that the Flex E4X documentation didn't cover, and I couldn't find an example for ActionScript 3 or JavaScript that covered it. Essentially, I had XML in the data property of an itemRenderer that looked something like this:

<question id="1>
<selected>
1
</selected>
<selected>
5
</selected>
</question>

Essentially, my itemRenderer has five buttons (A-E), any or all of which can be selected. If the user clicks one of the buttons and it is already selected, it should be deselected. Or, in other words, if there is already an element in the data XML's "selected" collection with the same value as what the user clicked (assuming A=1 and E=5), then that element should be deleted.

I had a challenge, though, in that I didn't want to use a for loop. I was using XML, and E4X should be able to handle this easily. The problem I had was that every E4X example I found that referenced the contents of the nodes of an XML node presumed that there would only be one of each node of the same node. So if my XML structure had been

<question id="1>
<selected>
1
</selected>
</question>

then life would have been easy. I could have used data.(selected==userSelection) and away I'd go. But the problem when you have multiple nodes named "selected" is that data.selected returns an XMLList that contains all of the nodes. Hence, it cannot be equal to any single number, even though when there is only one node it works fine.

So, after much research, I came up with something like this:

myXMLNode:XML="<selected>"+userSelection+"</selected>";
if (data.selected.contains(myXMLNode){
//loop through and delete any nodes with that value
} else {
//add a node of that value
}

I wasn't really happy with this, and I posted to the Flex Coders mailing list. Tracy Spratt suggested that I use the text() method of the XML object, so I wound up with something like this in my final logic:

if (data.selected.(text()==userSelection).length()==0){
//add the selected node to the data object
data.prependChild(myXMLNode);
} else {
//remove the selected node from the data object
for (i=data.selected.length()-1; i>=0; i--){
if (data.selected[i] == userSelection){
delete data.selected[i];
}

I hope this will help someone else solve this problem without having to waste as much time as I spent on this!