Between the Ext JS forums and Stack Overflow, there are LOTS of questions that get asked about grids, and for obvious reasons: the data grid is one of Ext JS’s most powerful data-driven components.

With new developers especially, I see a common question asked quite a bit about a pretty standard bit of functionality: the “paged” data set. In this post, I’m not going to necessarily go into all the nuances of *how* to configure a paged grid in Ext JS (there are plenty of docs for that). Rather, I want to focus on *what* paging in an Ext JS grid is, and how it relates to the server.

What It Isn’t

The most important rule to understand when dealing with paging data from a remote data set is that Ext JS grids–regardless of how powerful they are–are STUPID. By this, I don’t mean that they are poorly built, or that they lack features, don’t work, or anything like that. Rather, I simply mean that when it comes to the data you are asking them to display, they are completely ignorant. When you configure an Ext JS data grid to display (and page) remote data, you will be lost if you think that More >