Imagine you're starting a new project using ASP.NET MVC. Let's say it's a project which frequently requires displaying a list of records, like Google or Stack Overflow or an enterprise database application. Which grid should you use? The obvious answer is, "I don't know. I'm just getting started. Does it really matter, right now?" Don't you wish! There are many grids available for ASP.NET MVC. If you're prepared to dedicate your project to a single grid at the outset of your project, and n...

Apologies to those who tried my grid.history demo page Friday. In the course of updating the integration to support jqGrid 3.7.2 and simultaneously learning GitHub's pages feature, I killed the demo. It's fixed now, and I've added the ability to run the unit tests directly from that site, making it easier for me to test multiple browsers on the demo site, instead of just locally....

I recently finished an integration between the open source jqGrid and jQuery BBQ libraries. I have released my integration as open source, as well. As with both projects, it is dual-licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses. jqGrid is a JavaScript grid component with many useful features. I have previously explained how to use it with ASP.NET MVC. jQuery BBQ is a library which helps you manage proper functionality of the web browser's back and forward buttons by changing the fragment (hash) ...

Version 3.5.2 of jqGrid included an important new feature: Now when autoencode is set to true we encode the data coming from server and not only when we post it (secutity fix) Prior to this, you were required to encode the data yourself. Now personally, I think that should be the default. But it would have been a breaking change for the grid, since there are a few cases where you want to display unencoded data (I'll discuss these exceptional cases in a second). It's really easy to make t...

If you spend enough time with the PagedList class that I've been using for paging in the method which supplies data to jqGrid, it's a near-certainty that sooner or later you will see a LINQ error with Count in the call stack. The error may seem confusing, because it has nothing to do with Count. Commentor Graeme has been experimenting with my demo solution, and has run into just this issue: Finding your blogs very helpful - superbly written - just found out about jqgrid last night and have inte...

This is the fifth post in a series on using jqGrid with ASP.NET MVC. Today, we’re going to begin examining the grid's editing features by implementing deletes. If you’re new to the series, you might want to start at the beginning. The delete feature of jqGrid is, oddly, almost entirely undocumented, even though there quite a few examples of different methods of editing, and inserts are documented, to a lesser extent. But it does exist; I just had to read the source code to figure out how it w...

This is the fourth post in a series on using jqGrid with ASP.NET MVC. Today, we're going to examine search and formatting results. I will implement a search feature and fix the problem with formatting date columns which I observed in the last post. I've updated the demo solution with these new features, and also fixed a bug reported by Andrey last time. If you're new to the series, you might want to start at the beginning. First, let's fix the date display. The reason the date appeared so odd...

I have a couple of short updates on topics I've covered recently. On The Podcast at Delphi.org, Nick Hodges confirms my earlier speculation about reorganization in the "CodeGear" group at Embarcadero. The whole show is worth listening to. Congratulations are due to Chris Pattinson, who was promoted to Director of Quality for all of Embarcadero. Time to update the subtitle of your blog, Chris! (And maybe even write a post or two...) Sounds like good changes all around. You read it here first, ...

Having introduced jqGrid and written LINQ extension methods to make supplying data to the grid easy, we're now ready to put together a demo application. The solution I'm going to build demonstrates sorting and paging. In a future post, I will enhance it to demonstrate search, formatting, and editing data. I've made the demo application available for download, but be advised that I intend to update it in the next few days; it's currently a work in progress. Rather than make you set up the Nort...

Mere hours after I posted the first in a planned series of posts on using jqGrid in ASP.NET MVC applications, Phil Haack, a rather-more-widely-read-ASP.NET-MVC-blogger, wrote a long post on, er, exactly the same thing. Who, me, bitter? Naahhh… :) But it turns out that we're using the grid in a different way, and I think the difference is important. So rather than just referring you to Phil's post and skipping the rest of the series, I think I still have some important information to contribut...