I want to call this a bug because, as the name implies, “editoptions” is optional.

But without “editoptions”, a column with edittype=”select” will be created in a formedit dialog without an “id” attribute, which results a data element missing when the form is submitted. Of course, this is only a problem when one wants to customize the form initialization — Most people probably do not use jqgrid that way.

A workaround seems to be always have an “editoptions” parameter for a “select” type column.