jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

For our application we need to generate scores of different types of grids for a wide application of views.  Some edit, some are simple selectors, some need field validation and extention, some do not.  Our server controller layer generates an xml definition of the view for a given grid need.

A given column looks like this.

<STATUS width="100" editable="true" edittype="select">Status</STATUS>

The php on the server renders this as a json string which is encoded in the client via
ColModel = JSON.parse(returnArr[1]);
ColNames = JSON.parse(returnArr[0]); 
(the return array contains both the colModel, and the ColName so we can do it one server request).

I've tried feeding the editoptions in, in various ways.

<STATUS width="100" editable="true" edittype="select" editoptions="{value:'Live:Pending'}">Status</STATUS>

Which renders a valid json string, but the options don't show up.  I've tried switching the quotes around so the values are encased in double quotes. (the legal json syntax)
 If I do that the json parse fails.  I've tried doing string replacement on the single quotes surrounding the options (parse fails again).

I'm not finding good examples on simply adding the editoptions post-load.  I can set other json switches I can read in the string to allow this if I have to.

Another solution would be to feed the colModel and header directly with XML since our technology spits out whatever sort of xml view we need to start with.