First, I want to say thanks for making such a great grid component open source, jqgrid is an awesome tool.

So I've searched google and this forum and haven't found an exact solution for this using jqGrid, but I've found similar questions.

(The closest I found was: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6230277/can-i-customize-text-on-jqgrid-search-options-on-per-column-basis )

Basically I have a column model with customized searchoptions for a start date field.

colModel:[

{name:'User',index:'user.name', width:100},
{name:'StartDate',index:'user.start_date', width:55, formatter: doDateFormat,