Question

I am extremely new to PHP and, although I am quite familiar to javascript, I am learning how to use the massive jqGrid plugin right now. I am trying to understand how jqGrid serializes the grid data and how PHP parses this data. Currently, I am not even connecting to MySQL, but I am simply trying to echo the serialized jqGrid data as “fake” results. I have the following code for js in the head of my PHP file:

<script type='text/javascript'>
   $(function(){
      $('#list').jgGrid({
         url:'grid.php',
         mtype:'POST',
         colNames:['json'],
         colModel:[{name:'j',index:'j',searchoptions:{sopt:['eq']},search:true}],
         pager:'#pager',
         rowNum:10,
         viewrecords:true,
         gridview:true,
         serializeGridData:function(postData){
            return postData;
         }
      })
   });
</script>

I then send this information to my ‘grid.php’ file, which has the following code:

<?php
   $jason = $_POST['postData'];
   $page = $jason->{'page'};
   echo '<rows>';
      echo '<page>1</page>';
      echo '<total>1</total>';
      echo '<records>1</records';
      echo '<row id="1">';
         echo '<cell>'.$page.'</cell>';
      echo '</row>';
   echo '</rows>';
?>

When I remove the serializegriddata option from the JS, everything works fine (I also add in the default $_POST[‘page’], $_POST[‘rows’], $_POST[‘sidx’], $_POST[‘sord’] back into the PHP). The problem comes in when I add the serializegriddata.

I am looking for any examples of how to use the postData on the client side (are the any other functions I need to add to the serializegriddata or can I just return the postData) and how to properly parse this in PHP (how to $_POST the data and then how to parse and use this data). I know this is probably an extremely simple solution, but everything I find just talks about the client and says nothing about the server side. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Okay, I am a little slow, but I partially answered my own question. All of the jqGrid documentation read as if your entire postData was parsed as a JSON string if you set multipleSearch:true. I thought that I had to parse every variable into a postData JSON variable, then pass this to PHP. Although the solution took a little work to properly implement, the thing that I was missing was the fact that with multipleSearch:true, this adds just a ‘filter’ variable to the AJAX call. This filter variable is parsed as follows:

$filters = $_POST['filters'];
$json = json_decode($filters,true);

and the result of $filters is:

{"groupOp":"AND","rules":[{"field":"Customer","op":"eq","data":"eosp"}]}

This is as opposed to the multipleSearch:false option of:

$sField = $_POST['sField'];
$sValue = $_POST['sValue'];
$sOper = $_Post['sOper'];

Once I got this, I was able to loop through all instances of my search parameters and create my $where variable. One thing that almost became a big problem for me was the old example I was able to find about properly constructing a (link below) is that you can only have WHERE is a mysql_query only 1 time.

http://blog.brzezinka.eu/webmaster-tips/jquery/how-to-enable-the-search-functionality-in-jqgrid

I hope this might help someone in the future (it drove me crazy for almost 2 days straight).