I think you'll have to use the combo's store for that. Combos have a private findRecord
method that'll do a simple search over the store by property and value. You can see an example in the sourcecode itself (Combo.js line 1119).
1) Based on this you could find the selected index this way :
var v = combobox.getValue();
var record = combobox.findRecord(combobox.valueField || combobox.displayField, v);
var index = combobox.store.indexOf(record);
2) Or you could bind yourself to the "select" event which is fired with the combo, the record selected and its index as a parameter.
3) You could also access the view's getSelectedIndexes() but I doubt it's a good solution (in that I'm not sure it's available all the time)
Finally if you want to extend the combobox object I think this should work (if you go with the first solution) :
Ext.override(Ext.form.ComboBox({
getSelectedIndex: function() {
var v = this.getValue();
var r = this.findRecord(this.valueField || this.displayField, v);
return(this.store.indexOf(r));
}
});