jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

Hello,

    I have a jqGrid and, on the same page in another HTML section, I have a search box with content. I would like to create a javascript function that, onClick of the HTML form, the search is "executed" in the jqGrid.

     I haven't found any documentation to do this - only to create a search form within jqGrid itself. For various reasons, that's not possible.

     I've looked for many hours now and the closest thing I could find was a post on this forum about a user who wanted to repopulate a search that existed when the browser was closed & re-opened later (using session variables on the PHP side). This is similar, but not quite the same.

Basically, I was thinking I could do something like:

$("#MyGrid").searchGrid({name:'fieldname', defval:'searchvalue'}).triggerSearch();

but apparently I'm way off. Any help here would be great.

Thanks

- Darren