jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

I'm looking for a good way to add an icon as button and a shortened text also when line is not selected for edit.

This for a note column, so the idea is to show some thing like 10 characters of the text and when you click the note icon it'll show a popup to edit the note, incase the line is not in edit mode select it, switch to edit and show dialog.

The problem I'm having is getting/setting the text of the dialog and updating the record.

I tried using a combination of the custom formatter and element, the formatter for the icon when not editing and the elment for the one in edit mode and dialog.

Can someone please advice me on this or perhaps someone has a good example to do this properly?