if the root element does not have an id, importing data casues a bug as it tries to reference :

“# tbody:first”

notice the space after #, as if the main element does not have an id, nothing is set here.

As my creation of the jqgrid was dyanmic, to counteract the bug I set the id during dynamic creation as follows:

id : (function(){ return "dynamic_grid"+$(".ui-jqgrid").length })

This allows for multiple grids to be in the document, but adds a total amount of jqgrids in the document to the end of each id to make it unique.