hmm i see. so there is a reason to that custom ID madness :)

i agree about update panels. they are very evil. 

so you seem to be very knowlegeable in web and infragistics. maybe you could offer some advice regarding custom sort of the grid? 

I recently even upgraded to infra 8.2 in hopes to get around this issue.. I've also tried to reverse engineer their code to get some answers but there is a lot of it and it wasn't clear  how the regular sort is performed. 

my problem is that i am binding the grid to a collection of custom objects. It is a non standard approach i agree, but it offers some other benefits and i would like to keep it that way. Lets say an object in my array has a TradeDate property. that property type is not DateTime, but Object because i am inheriting it from a common base type that offers additional functionality. As a result, i had to override IFormattable, IConvertible, IComparable interfaces to make my collection work correctly with the rest of .net framework. Infragistics however isnt playing by regular rules it seems because it doesn't seem to be using my IComparable implementation to do the sort.. (hmm never tested this claim)

The problem is that when i sort by date, it behaves in a weird way, it appears to be working for half the table, than resetting and working again. so it will sort april 1 - May 5 in first half of rows, and than go from april 12 - may 10 in latter half. 

i thought i was being slick by creating my own sort mechanism which would happen on my collection before binding to the grid, and that works, BUT when i added OutlookGroupBy the grid than re-sorts the order. so the sort gets lost in all subtables in outlook mode. so it appears i cant use my own sort. 

i've spent quite a bit of time trying to figure this out.. it would realy suck if the only solution was to convert my array to a datatable right before binding to the grid :( 

Well I use pipe (can be anything) because I put more than the id of the control inside the id and use js to parse the id for particular information (there is a whole other reason that I cannot go into on a public site for this as well) 

I know .NET does a lot of this stuff for you but as with anything it comes with a price so for example I know I can drop a scriptmanager on a page and wrap content in a update panel and *BOOM* I have a ajax page... But at what cost I can create a simple ajax request (json) and build my own xml/innerhtml functions with about 10% of the footprint that the script manager is doing and reduce my overhead down to nothing so what it really comes down to is personal preference they all do the same thing.

I do use.ClientID for a most things but sometimes when using supporting JS files it doesn't always make sense to do that if I am injecting and/or have a script tag in the page then I use clientid just depends on what i am doing and what type of security I am dealing with.

However, I would have to agree with you on one point though and that would be Commerical Controls should follow a standard across the board because you use one control and it does things one way and you go to another control and things are done 180 degrees the other way. It can all be very annoying.

why use pipe? why use anything? .net handles it for you :)

i never touched that piece on custom controls and just use ClientID when need to access it on client. thats the reason it's there. 

HAHAHA "wtfwtfwtfwwtf" that is funny as all hell...

I am not sure what IG's reason is behind that, but when I build custom controls I use a pipe so i dont have to worry about if my control is in a masterpage verus a web control etc. that way I don't have to worry about stuff like object.replace(/_/g, '$'); etc.

also notice that to get a reference of the div id, i have to do 

myGrid.UniqueID.Replace("$","x") + "_div"

do you know why they use x's to join client id instead of _ (.net client id) or $ (.net unique id)

i have to call that replace every time...