Kendo Grid - Can Group by be more like Hierarchy

[Matthew]

I have a grid that requests data remotely. This is where the filtering and sorting is also performed. So data will be returned in batches of 20/50/100 depending on the paging and selection.

Quite a few of the options will have datasets of >1500 records (could potentially be far more and will grow) which complicates things. The group by appears to be working fine but visually its not as easy to traverse when it is in this mode - As the first 3-6 pages could be the same group and the user may want to go digging into a few groups (or not even know they exist) making it harder to find rows. 
http://demos.kendoui.com/web/grid/index.html - group by last name and shrink both... you visually scan about two items per page on average. When the data set is much larger then imagine only one group over several pages and you are looking for data.

Ideally I would like it to show as many groups as the paging is set and then page on the different groups similar to the way hierarchy would: http://demos.kendoui.com/web/grid/hierarchy.html 
Going down the route of the hierarchy would be a little tedious as there may be many items grouped in the header and in different orders. So out of 8 columns 5 are likely to be commonly grouped, and could be grouped to all the different levels but a depth of three is more likely. Lastly overriding the default grouping aspect... This all could be quite complicated, but if this can be managed quite easily then im all for it.

Is there any way of changing the group by functionality to work more effectively in this scenario? Ie load the group by first and lazy load the data second depending on the opened/collapsed group(s)

Note: Loading all of the data before hand and using client side group by isnt really an option as it takes too long to process the data. It will be loading descriptions in the grid (html formatted text) so the data becomes quite hefty.

Thanks,
Matt

[Dimo]

Hi Matt,

I understand your goal and concerns, however, I am afraid the Grid datasource does not support such a behavior. Usually TreeList-like components work the way you have described, but they use a completely different implementation to achieve this.

All the best,
Dimo
the Telerik team

[Matthew]

Thanks Dimo.
I didn't think this would be possible yet.
I've stuck to the way it handles group by now which makes live easier.


Thanks again,
Matt