A coworker was tasked with finding a good client-side grid for displaying and editing data from WCF services. We’ve had a little experience with WCF services and JSON serialization of simple data to generate some custom HTML but until now we hadn’t touched grids. Typically we’d use a 3rd party ASP.NET control inside a web application but lately we’ve been trying to be a little more lean.
I haven’t done any research into grids myself so I’m taking it on faith that jqGrid is alright for us. Right out of the gate there was some trouble getting the JSON data to be in a format the grid appreciated. Since we didn’t fancy the idea of boxing all our services into returning data in this format we had to get the grid to work with our format.
I went from knowing nothing about this grid to having 20 tabs open on various sites trying to find any information I could regarding options for making the grid work with our data. It is shocking how much information is out there but I didn’t find a single source that put it all together. It was through pure persistence I found a reference to jsonReader and then found the properties it expects.
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