jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

Just a suggestion, the _search parm is set to enable searching when set to true, which is great, but when the ajax request reaches the server it has no idea the request is happening on an initial form load (i.e. the ajax performs the retrieval of data from the server as the page loads for the first time), so my server side code sees _search=true and expects search values and finds none, so now the server code doesn't know if the parms are missing, are the parms there but empty values or was it not a search in the first place. Can we add another parm to indicate that the user is actually performing a search or add another url, like searchurl that can be tuned to perform searches so we can call a different Mvc action on the server, knowing the request was for searching? So for now I will check if any of the searchOper or searchField is missing to assume it is not a search, is this the correct approach? Any ideas or recommendations on how to bext handle the situation?