jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

 { name: "foo", index: "food", formatter: myFormatter }

And then I have this method:

function myFormatter(cellValue, options, rowObject)

{

    var img = $("<img />").attr("src", "foo.gif")

        .click(function()

        {

            // do something...

            // Note that all of the local vars are available to me as closures!!  HUGE advantage!

        });

    // We're returning a jQuery object.

    return img;

}

This does not currently work in jqgrid.  I have a patched version of 3.8.2 that I edited to make it work, but it's not a terribly trivial edit, so upgrading to newer versions of jqgrid is difficult.  This is a feature that others have asked for as well.

/blog/?page_id=393/feature-request/about-row-formatter/&value=jquery%20formatter&type=1&include=1&search=2

/blog/?page_id=393/feature-request/allow-custom-formatters-to-return-jquery-wrapped-dom-nodes/&value=jquery%20formatter&type=1&include=1&search=4

My edits were limited to grid.base.js (again, this was on version 3.8.2). I modified addJSONData (I didn't alter support for xml, because I don't use it).  The main while loop in addJSONData() keeps calling rowData.push(...), where the "..." is a call to addCell(), which calls formatter() and formatCol().  I added checks in formatter() and formatCol() to see if the value returned is a jquery object ("obj instanceof jQuery").  addCell() performs a similar check, and in the case of a jQuery object, instead of returning a string: "<td>" + val  + "</td>", it returns $("<td></td>").append(val).

It's not a ton of work, but it's annoying to edit the source file and create my own custom build each time I want to upgrade my jqgrid library.  This would be so incredibly useful for all users!