It seems to me that the footerData method is basically the same as using userDataOnFooter because you have to feed it an array with name:value pairs. I don't want to calculate the totals myself, I want jqgrid to do this for me based on the given summaryType and summaryTpl in my colModel options. This is all done for you when grouping is enabled, but when grouping is disabled, these options are ignored.
Thanks for your answer. I hadn't seen the “In this case you can construct your own search parameters and trigger the grid to search the data. Any other return value causes triggering.” comments for the beforeSearch and beforeClear events.
I will try it out and see if it does the job for me ^^
As I said in my post, there are other usecases where I'd like to use a custom client side sort funcion such as a column with ip addresses or mac addresses in it.
