It's the start of a new decade and I've got a long list of New Years resolutions, one is to start a personal blog ( I normally write for the e-DBA blog ) and another is to do some jQuery moonlighting. I'm an Ext JS man, but with APEX 4.0 due out sometime soon and jQuery being a big part of it I thought I'd cover a my bases by gaining a little knowledge.


So my first task is to integrate jqGrid using a template based approach, luckily I'm able apply most the knowledge I've learned from integrating an Ext grid into APEX which has made it fairly straight forward. I guess you might be wondering why I'm going to integrate the jqGrid and not look to create a plugin?

Well the reason purely is that I want to use the APEX IDE to customize it. If you think about the work that went into the "Report Wizard" there's no way I want to look at duplicating it, so I'd rather reuse it, as essentially editing the report definition provides us everything we need e.g. authorizations, conditions, sort order, column names, column formatting, column ordering, page size, max rows, links etc. in order to customize our jqGrid. But what I might look to create is a plugin to manage some extra metadata for it as there's a long list of config parameters for the widget.


Anyway the first step has been to download the source and familiarize myself with the API, and there's a lot of similarities with Ext. So far I've been able to get the jqgrid rendering using a JSON reader, as my report template outputs a JSON object. I'm currently supporting sorting, pagination, filtering and reloading. Which is not much better than your standard PPR report, but it's early days. I've got my eye on subgrids, scrolling rows, and of course an editable version. So watch this space as I'll be offering the integration for download very soon!