As you can see in the jqGrid source code (see here ), the design behavior is like this. The oldest version of jqGrid that I could find is jqGrid 3.5.2, and the version also dumped the contents of the grid.
If you need different reload button behavior, you can add (using navButtonAdd ) your custom button, which looks like the original reload button (this cat has "ui-icon-refresh" as the buttonicon parameter) and implements a different reload behavior. For example, you can simply call trigger("reloadGrid", [{page:1}]) .
Another option is to reload the settings beforeRefresh and afterRefresh events.
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