jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

Folks,

I am trying to do a couple of things here so please bear with my question. I have a jqGrid friendly XML response coming back from the server that I render into my grid. However, before I show the data on the grid, I need to modify the contents of one of the cells and add a new cell to the returned XML. I have done this through a function that is invoked through datatype.

The problem is that I also have to do local search and sort on the returned data, but still go back to the server on pagination requests. This is at odds with out of the box jqgrid behaviour which turns off pagination on loadonce = true and which essentiall ignores loadonce if a function is used for datatype. Do any good folks here have ideas on the right way to accomplish both:

1. Post process XML data (which might require a function datatype handler)
2. Do local search and sort
3. Go to server only on pagination requests.

Thanks in advance for your help and insights.

-Raj