jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

I'm trying out jqgrid plugin and it seems to fit most of my need, that's a nice plugin.

Only thing that is missing out for a project I work on, is line grouping or nesting, I need to allow two level of grouping over the same set of data (that is not hierarchical data).

What I mean is something like outlook "group by", let say we have buyorder list, here is some sample of what an user would like:

• group them by date and status and sort by customer
• group them by status and customer, and sort by date
• ... you get the idea

How this will fit? here is a naïve idea:

the server will return data ordered by the grouped column(s) then the column order (this mean multiple order clauses)

the client will iterate over each row comparing the cells value with previous row corresponding to the grouping parameters:

if the values are identical, render the row as expected, if the value are not the same, then a grouping row need to be rendered.

The grouping rows could be collapsed/expanded at will.

Is there already a way to achieve this? if not is this something that would fit with jqGrid API?