jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

Really liking the grid, by the way.

If my XML looks like this:

<items total="5">
     <item>
            ...stuff here
     </item>
     <item>
            ...stuff here
     </item>
      <item>
            ...stuff here
     </item>
</items>

is it possible to use the "total" attribute in the "items" tag to supply the "total" field in the xmlReader?  If so, what would the syntax be?

Thanks!