What the difference between loadComplete and gridComplete events?

Question

This question originated after I looked on this answer of Oleg and demo-grids in it.

gridComplete:

This fires after all the data is loaded into the grid and all other processes are complete. Also the event fires independent from the datatype parameter and after sorting paging and etc.

loadComplete:

This event is executed immediately after every server request. data Data from the response depending on datatype grid parameter

From that docs I understood that gridComplete fires at the end of drawing grid, and loadComplete fires after jqGrid completes communication with backend.

And so I wonder - why in demos, loadComplete used for change color of cells and not gridComplete?

Frogfish

without a ton of familiarity with the differences between the loadComplete and gridComplete properties, i would assume that loadComplete loads all data, styling, layout, and spacing, while gridComplete just takes the data from the loadComplete method and render's the grid in the view. – Osher

Answer 1

I think that this question is asked by many users of jqGrid. So it's interesting to know the answer.

I personally prefer to use loadComplete. If you examine code from all my examples which I posted, you will find gridComplete only when the Original Poster posted it in the question and I would have modified a little code. I prefer to use loadComplete because of some advantages of loadComplete and disadvantages of gridComplete.

Here are advantages of loadComplete:

• It's the last callback which will be called if the whole grid body will be reloaded. For example after loading the page on the grid from the server. It's important to understand, that if the user changes sorting of some column or sets filter or chooses another page of the grid; the grid body will be reloaded.
• loadComplete has parameter data which represent full page of local data or full data loaded from the server.

On the other side gridComplete will be called (in the current version of jqGrid 4.4.4) from internal updatepager (see here), which will be called from delRowData (see here), addRowData (see here) and clearGridData (see here) methods; in addition to addXmlData (see here) and addJSONData (see here). It's not what one mostly want.

Another disadvantage of gridComplete one can see if one examines the code of addXmlData (see here) and addJSONData (see here) from where updatepager is called and so gridComplete will be called. If one uses loadonce: true and the internal parameters data and _index will be filled with full data returned from the server. One can see when using loadonce: true; the callback gridComplete will be called after the first page of data are loaded from the sever. At this moment data and _index contains only the data for the page. On the other side loadComplete will be called later after all data returned from the server are processed and saved locally in data and _index.

If you load the data from the server and if you don't use loadonce: true option, clearGridData, addRowData and delRowData then you could use gridComplete instead of loadComplete.

Addieaddiego

Answer 2

Looking at the source of jqGrid (source) you can see that gridComplete is called on just one line of grid.base.

1725: if($.isFunction(ts.p.gridComplete)) {ts.p.gridComplete.call(ts);}

This line comes from the function updatePager.

You can find loadComplete in the populate function (line 1757). Unlike gridComplete, it is passed an extra parameter. Both callbacks receive a reference to this, but loadComplete also receives the data returned from the server (or passed in locally):

1858: case "xmlstring": 
if(lcf) {ts.p.loadComplete.call(ts,dstr);}

1869: case "jsonstring": 
if(lcf) {ts.p.loadComplete.call(ts,dstr);}

1881: 
case "local":
case "clientside":
if(lc) { lc.call(ts,req); }

The thing is, the functions populate and updatePager often happen in tandem, so you see that when sorting and paging, both callbacks are called. The difference, once again, is that loadComplete is passed an extra parameter.

There are probably subtle differences that I haven't encountered yet... and there might be cases where one is called and the other isn't, but I have noticed that on sorting and paging, both are called.

Fibula