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jqGrid missing search codes

Nov 18, 2009
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Recently, I've had a need for presenting tabular data in my MVC-style web application, and I figured this is such a common task that I might as well ask around. Thus I posted this question on stack-overflow about presenting tabular data, and was told about jqGrid (the project author's site can load a little slow sometimes).

jqGrid is pretty impressive, as far as client-side capabilities go, it puts the old asp.net webforms GridView to shame. But it's got a couple of minor problems, for one the API has a kind of hacked-together feel and the jQuery plugin initialization function call is epic, even for average uses of the grid. That said the jqGrid does almost everything you can think of, from searching and paging to editing and selecting rows.

I think what slowed me down the most was the disjointed nature of the documentation. After reading some random blog posts, I finally found the main core of docs here. But even those docs have some random holes in them that have to be filled via google and blog posts.

One thing in particular I found missing, was that when you are implementing searching you have to be able to translate the search operator codes sent by the grid to the server into something you can use on the server side. One mildly frustrating problem was that the documentation only lists 9 of the 14 total search operator codes that you have to translate.

I'll list the rest of the codes here:
bn - not begins with ( !(LIKE val%) )
in - is in ( checks if the searchField is in the searchString )
ni - is not in (checks if the searchField is not in the searchString )
en - does not end with (!(LIKE %val) )
nc - does not contain (!(LIKE %val%))

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