Telerik MVC Grid fails to bind after calling .ajaxRequest - asp.net-mvc

Question

I have something of a weird situation going on. I'm trying to build a Telerik MVC grid in a custom HTML helper which implements some other custom functionality. (Amongst other things, it renders a form to the right of the grid when a row is selected. We're not using the in-box editing features of the grid due to UI standardization. The whole requirement is that, for simple list-of-values tables in a database, we'd like a minimal-code approach. One line in the HTML, a few lines of Javascript at most, and boom, done.)
Everything works -- except rebinding the data dynamically. The grid renders, its selection works, the form displays, the form saves at blur events. The grid hits the OnDataBinding event, but nothing happens after that. It never gets to the OnDataBound event, and it never hits the internal bindTo nor bindData methods on the grid object itself.
"Enough" of the code (a lot of it can't be revealed) is thus (HTML helper):
public static void ListOfValuesEditorFor<TModel, TModelCollection>(this HtmlHelper<TModelCollection> htmlHelper, string gridName, string refreshAction, string refreshController, string loadItemUrl, IEnumerable<TModel> model) where TModel : class where TModelCollection : IEnumerable<TModel>
{
var factory = HtmlHelperExtension.Telerik<TModelCollection>(htmlHelper);
var grid = factory.Grid(model);
grid = grid.Name(gridName).Pageable(pager => pager.Enabled(false)).Selectable(select => select.Enabled(true)).Filterable(filter => filter.Enabled(false)).Scrollable().Sortable(sort => sort.Enabled(false));
grid = grid.DataBinding(binding => binding.Ajax().Select(refreshAction, refreshController));
grid = grid.ClientEvents(events =>
{
events.OnDataBound("Telerik.ListOfValues.OnDataBound");
events.OnDataBinding("Telerik.ListOfValues.OnDataBinding");
events.OnRowSelect("Telerik.ListOfValues.SelectRow");
});
var textControls = new List<string>();
int idColumn = -1;
grid = grid.Columns(columns =>
{
int cellCount = 0;
foreach (var prop in typeof(TModel).GetProperties())
{
// Populates columns, creates text entry controls in the list,
// handles some other proprietary work.
// SNIP
}
});
// Container for the form
var formDivBuilder = new TagBuilder("div");
// Build out the form
// SNIP
// Render to the response
var response = HttpContext.Current.Response;
response.Write("<input type=\"hidden\" id=\"loadItemUrl\" value=\"" + loadItemUrl + "\" />");
response.Write("<input type=\"hidden\" id=\"idColumnIndex\" value=\"" + idColumn.ToString() + "\" />");
grid.Render();
response.Write(formDivBuilder.ToString(TagRenderMode.Normal));
}
That HTML helper is called thusly:
<% using (Html.BeginForm()) {
Html.ListOfValuesEditorFor("JobTitleGrid", "RefreshJobTitles", "Home", "/Home/LoadJobTitle", Model);
} %>
On the Javascript side of the world, all OnDataBound and OnDataBinding do is display messages indicating that they've been hit. In fact, they won't even make it to the production version of the code; they're in there for debugging purposes now.
OnSelect displays and populates the form. This is happening correctly.
The form itself updates the object any time a text field's onChange event fires. This portion is validated as functional. This is done via a $.ajax() call, which again, is validated to function.
The success callback from that $.ajax() call is thus:
function onSubmitComplete(responseData, callbackData) {
// Some irrelevant junk here
$('#JobTitleGrid').data('tGrid').ajaxRequest();
}
The call to ajaxRequest functions. At the server, my grid action functions, returning an IList of the IJobTitle objects. At the client, OnDataBinding fires, displaying its message. OnDataBound never fires, and the grid display does not update.
I know this is somewhat outside the bounds of the way Telerik controls are normally used, but the sheer amount of code necessary to use them encourages my team to try to create reusable entities (such as these custom HTML helpers) wherever possible. For the simpler controls (text boxes, calendars, etc), our custom helpers have always "just worked." The grid, though, is presenting this problem.
Any ideas on why we never get to binding the data? More importantly, how to fix that?

Answer 1

After coming up with the solution, I'd briefly considered deleting the question -- Telerik's grid is only minimally involved here. However, I know first-hand how hard it is to troubleshoot code when you're building on top of frameworks, which are built on top of frameworks, which are further built on top of frameworks. :) So hopefully this answer will help the next guy down the line.
The actual issue turned out to be a serialization exception from the DAL call in the grid action. This seemed odd to me, since I used the exact same call to populate both the pre-loaded view in the Index action and the response from the GridAction, but sure enough, if I debugged down in the Javascript deeply enough, I eventually found it. The exception wasn't being handled (pro-tip: implement an OnError handler for the grid), and thus client-side rebinding failed, as it had no data to bind.
Once I resolved the serialization issue, everything just magically worked, and we were down to about 20 lines of code to implement an entire generic entity data entry screen.