Basic Concepts

Once you get your feet wet with the demo console, its time to look further into actual live examples. Majority of the times, the back end sends data in JSON format. Although this is not necessary, and the grid is able to consume XML data as well. Just look at the XML Data and XML Grouped data examples. One thing to note, is that even if you send the grid XML, internally it converts it to JSON prior to rendering using the XML2Json library. That said, there are a number of use cases that the grid supports that involve complex interactions with the back-end. Lets take a look at some of these use cases, and along the way learn how to implement them with various different back-end technologies.

As most of you are aware the HTMLTreeGrid supports two types of data flat and hierarchical. In the next couple of sections, we will see what each of these means.