The year was 2010 (not really that long ago I know) and the project that I was working on was sorely in need of a new grid component. It was an ASP.NET WebForms project and for some time we'd been using what was essentially a glorified datagrid which had a few extra features implemented to allow us to change column order / columns displayed / copy contents to clipboard etc. Our grid worked perfectly fine - it gave us the functionality we needed. However, it looked pretty terrible, and had some "quirky" approaches in place for supporting IE and Firefox side by side. Also, at the time we were attempting to make our app seem new and exciting again for the users. The surprising truth is that users seem to be more impressed with a visual revamp than with new or amended functionality. So I was looking for something which would make them sit up and say "oooh - isn't it pretty!". Unfortunately the nature of the organisation I was working for was not one that lended itself to paying for components. They were occasionally willing to do that but the hoops that would have to be jumped through first, the forms that would need to be signed in triplicate by people that had nearly nothing to do with the project made that an unattractive prospect. So I began my search initially looking at the various open source offerings that were around. As a minimum I was looking for something that would do what our home-grown component did already (change column order / columns displayed / copy contents to clipboard etc) but hopefully in a "nicer" way. Also, I had long been unhappy with the fact that to get our current grid to render results we did a *full postback* to the server and re-rendered the whole page. Pointless! Why should you need to do all this each time when you only wanted to refresh the data? Instead I was thinking about using an Ajax approach; a grid that could just get the data that it needed and render it to the client. This seemed to me a vastly "cleaner" solution - why update a whole screen when you only want to update a small part of it? Why not save yourself the trouble of having to ensure that all other screen controls are persisted just as you'd like them after the postback? I also thought it was probably something that would scale better as it would massively reduce the amount of data moving backwards and forwards between client and server. No need for a full page life cycle on the server each time the grid refreshes. Just simple data travelling down the pipes of web. With the above criteria in mind I set out on my Google quest for a grid. Quite soon I found that there was a component out there which seemed to do all that I wanted and far more besides. It was called jqGrid:
