Thanks Tony, although that's not quite what I need. Say my column contains '12 High Street', '1 High Street', 'The House, High Street', 'Other Place, High Street', I want to sort the first two as numbers and sort the last two as strings. If I could define my own sort algorithm this would be possible. Time to have a hack around in the code I guess

OK figured it out via some hacking of the source. The loadComplete event triggers after the grid has loaded so I moved that to just before the grid is loaded and then modify the XML returned via the AJAX call by converting the attributes to elements. Would be nice if there was another event to hook into to modify the data returned before the grid is populated