From what I can infer, you want to have a read-only parent grid, and when you expand one of its rows with the plus sign ("+") you want to see details for that row in editable mode and edit the respective row?

This could be possible, but it will require a bit of custom coding. We have one similar example online (it uses our ASP.NET component, but same principles apply for any platform) - 

http://trirand.net/examples/hi.....fault.aspx

You will see there, that you can have any HTML as a child subgrid (details for a row). In our case, we are showing photo and person details, but you can have edit textboxes (and in fact anything you need) as a details edit form, and then with a custom submit button update the database.

Hope this helps.

could we get subgrid editing in the parent form ? ie. you have the parents details editable on the parents form but then a little grid similar to "advanced search" underneath containing all the "items" of the subgrid? this would make an amazing feature. 

-gerhard