jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

I'm probably not doing this the right way, so please let me know if that's the case, but..

What I want to achieve is:

1. Grid starts out minimized

2. When somebody clicks a button on my page, I want to show the grid maximized and then have it do its loading thing.

3. The next time somebody clicks the button, it knows it's already maximized and then just triggers the reload of the data.

4. I want the cool animation for the minimize/maximize.

The issue I'm experiencing is:

1. If I set the grid state to visible programmatically, and then do .trigger("reloadGrid") it doesn't seem to do anything and the grid doesn't seem to load.

What I'm doing is:

I'm creating my grid with the hiddengrid property set to true so that my page starts out with the grid minimized. (hiddengrid: true)

Then I've got a method that looks like this:

function performMySearch() {

if ($("#mySearchResultsGrid").jqGrid('getGridParam', 'gridstate') == "hidden") {

$("#mySearchResultsGrid").jqGrid('setGridState','visible');

}

$("#mySearchResultsGrid").trigger("reloadGrid");

}

I appreciate any insights anyone might have.