ExtJs Grid provides a nice, quick way to build a UI that can handle a lot of tabular data and support the operations you’d typically like to perform on that data (sorting, filtering). It can be hard to style, but is great for whipping up admin CRUD functionality.

One thing that seems hard to do with it out of the box, however, is trigger filtering directly from your javascript, rather than via the UI.

Ext.grid.Panel does in fact expose the requisite properties and methods to accomplish this, but they’re a bit hard to track down, and not part of the official public API. This gist, GridFilteringExtensions.js, adds some methods to Ext.grid.Panel that make this easier. It probably won’t accomplish everything you want to do, and hasn’t been tested in a wide variety of situations, but it was exactly what I needed, and may be a good base from which to build.

Note that before manually setting a filter for the first time, you’ll need to call `createFilters`.