Working with jqGrid and a WCF Service

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Introduction

Here, I am going to show how to work with jqGrid with WCF in an ASP.NET application. jqGrid is an AJAX-enabled JavaScript control that provides solutions for representing and manipulating tabular data on the web.

Using the code

1. To start with, we need to download the latest version of jQuery and the jqGrid plug-in. At the time of writing, the latest version of jqGrid is jqGrid 3.5 beta. The major differences for this version is that starting with this version, jqGrid does not use a loader (which loads the needed files one by one), but all the needed code is contained in one file. The desired modules can be built using the jqGrid download manager. In order to use this, first a language file should be loaded and then the jqGrid file.
2. Next, you need to add JavaScript into your project and references using the script tag. In order to use jqGrid 3.5, first a UI theme CSS file should be loaded. The detailed instruction is in the downloaded jqGrid zip file. Then, we need to create an AJAX-enabled WCF Service in our ASP.NET web project. We need to create an method and add the following attributes to the method:
C#

[OperationContract]
[WebInvoke(Method = "POST",
            BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedRequest,
            ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json
            )]
public string GetProducts()
{
    IList<product> personList = ProductRepository.GetProducts();
    int total = 1, page = 10;
    ProductJqGridView productJqGridView = 
       new ProductJqGridView(total, page, personList);
    return productJqGridView.ToJson();
}

The GetProducts method will return a list of products. After that, I instantiate the ProductJqGridView object and call the ToJson method to serialize the object into the correct JOSN format so that jqGrid can consume it.

3. Before we look at the JavaScript, we need to see what is required in the markup. We need a table to display the data, a div for the page navigation, and a button to load the data. Please see the source code for details.
4. Last, we are going to look at how to write JavaScript to bind the JSON data to the jqGrid. We use a function as our data type. The function we are using is getProducts, which does an AJAX call to the server and a JSON string is returned. In successFunction, we insert all the data into the jqGrid by calling grid.addJSONData.
JavaScript

function successFunction(jsondata) {
    var thegrid = jQuery("#productGridView")[0];
    thegrid.addJSONData(JSON.parse(jsondata.d));
}
 
function getProducts() {
    $.ajax({
        url: DataLoader.svc/GetProducts,
        data: "{}",  // For empty input data use "{}",
        dataType: "json",
        type: "POST",
        contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
        success: successFunction
    });
}
 
function dataBindToGrid() {
    jQuery("#productGridView").jqGrid({
        datatype: getProducts,
        colNames: ['ProductID', 'Name', 'ProductNumber', 'Color', 'Size', 'Style'],
        colModel: [{ name: 'ProductID', index: 'ProductID', width: 200, align: 'left' },
            { name: 'Name', index: 'Name', width: 200, align: 'left' },
            { name: 'ProductNumber', index: 'ProductNumber', width: 200, align: 'left' },
            { name: 'Color', index: 'Color', width: 200, align: 'left' },
            { name: 'Size', index: 'Size', width: 200, align: 'left' },
            { name: 'Style', index: 'Style', width: 200, align: 'left' }
                   ],
        rowNum: 10,
        rowList: [5, 10, 20, 50, 100],
        sortname: 'ProductID',
        pager: jQuery('#pageNavigation'),
        sortorder: "desc",
        viewrecords: true
    });
}
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
    jQuery("input#LoadData").live("click", dataBindToGrid);
});

A word of caution...

This is only a simple example using jqGrid, many of its functionalities have not been implemented. Since this is only a "Hello World" like example, I will show some of its advanced functionalities in some other article.

Conclusion

The hardest part for using AJAX and jqGrid is not the concept but the level of JavaScript skills. To be able to write maintainable AJAX code, you need to learn JavaScript. I have created an article on my blog to help you learn JavaScript. Here is the link. I hope my examples can help people get started using jqGrid using WCF in an ASP.NET web application. Your feedback is much more appreciated.