I'm building an ASP.Net MVC2 application using the open-source version of the jqgrid plugin. I have used this excellent article to help me implement the server-side paging and search functionallity, but in this example he has only used the search dialog. In my application I would like to have both a search toolbar for quick "equals filtering", and in addition have the search dialog for more advanced filters.

Does anyone have experience in doing this, and could possibly give me a hint on how this best is done? As I see it, the filters from the search dialog is posted to the server in another way than the toolbar search. 

For the search dialog it uses a URL-parameter called "filter", containing all the search data, while for the toolbar it uses URL-parameters named after the columns you are filtering. (for instance "&TicketID=123"). Does anyone know the reason why it is not done in one common way? 

Are these two ways of searching actually supposed to be mutually exclusive within the same grid, so that I should have to use one of them only?

Will be thankful for all comments