jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

My first reaction is that jqgrid is really good and has a lot of potential. Congratulations to the ones who have done so much work!

I am currently somwhat concerned because I don't care for the way it deals with keys, indexes and edittype:select. (OR it might beh that I don't know how to make it behave in a way I find acceptable.)

Consider this workflow:

I have a table in the database used to define seasons, just 2 columns:

• season_tb.season_id
• season_tb.season

Now I want to use jqgrid, inline editing, edittype:select on the season field.

So I create a list from the database {'1':'spring', '2':'summer', '3':'fall', '4':'winter'} ) On the server side I use editoptions to configure the list.

In colModel I do this:

{name:'season_id',index:'season_id',width:100,editable:true, edittype:"select",editoptions:{<?=$season_list?>}},

In order for the grid to dissplay, spring, summer, fall, and winter, is to necessary to set season_id = "spring", which is wrong.

I acknowledge that on a post "season_id = 1". However dealing with "season_id" becomes difficult and confusing. At first "season_id" = "spring" then on a post "season_id"="1". Unless you edit  the row then "season_id"="&nbsp;". Which is even worse.

I find that I can make jquery do almost what I want, but there are just to many work arounds that I can't feel good about it.

Barry