find the array index of an object with a specific key value in underscore

If you want to stay with underscore so your predicate function can be more flexible, here are 2 ideas.

Method 1

Since the predicate for _.find receives both the value and index of an element, you can use side effect to retrieve the index, like this:

var idx;
_.find(tv, function(voteItem, voteIdx){ 
   if(voteItem.id == voteID){ idx = voteIdx; return true;}; 
});

Method 2

Looking at underscore source, this is how _.find is implemented:

_.find = _.detect = function(obj, predicate, context) {
  var result;
  any(obj, function(value, index, list) {
    if (predicate.call(context, value, index, list)) {
      result = value;
      return true;
    }
  });
  return result;
};

To make this a findIndex function, simply replace the line result = value; with result = index; This is the same idea as the first method. I included it to point out that underscore uses side effect to implement _.find as well.

Lo-Dash, which extends Underscore, has findIndex method, that can find the index of a given instance, or by a given predicate, or according to the properties of a given object.

In your case, I would do:

var index = _.findIndex(tv, { id: voteID });

Give it a try.

I don't know if there is an existing underscore method that does this, but you can achieve the same result with plain javascript.

Array.prototype.getIndexBy = function (name, value) {
    for (var i = 0; i < this.length; i++) {
        if (this[i][name] == value) {
            return i;
        }
    }
    return -1;
}

Then you can just do:

var data = tv[tv.getIndexBy("id", 2)]

findIndex was added in 1.8:

index = _.findIndex(tv, function(voteItem) { return voteItem.id == voteID })

See: http://underscorejs.org/#findIndex

Alternatively, this also works, if you don't mind making another temporary list:

index = _.indexOf(_.pluck(tv, 'id'), voteId);

See: http://underscorejs.org/#pluck