jqGrid postData and filtering

I have been struggling with this all day. My requirement is very simple: I'm using single field searching. I want to save the state of the grid (using postData and a cookie) when I leave the page and restore it when I come back. I'm able to save the postData to a cookie, but can't figure out how to restore the grid state again.

$(document).ready(documentReady);
function documentReady()
{
  $("#grid_clients").jqGrid({
      datatype: "local",
      height: 200,
      width: 832,
      shrinkToFit: true,
      caption:"Clients",
      colNames :["","Id","Name","Description","Active开发者_JAVA技巧<br />Studies"],
      colModel :[
        {name:"edit", index:"edit", width:20, align:"center", sortable:false, search: false},
    {name:"id", index:"id", width:40, align:"right", sorttype:'int'},
    {name:"name", index:"name", width:200},
    {name:"description",    index:"description",    width:200},
    {name:"studycount", index:"studycount", width:50,   align:"right", sorttype:'int'}
          ],
      pager:"pager_clients",
      scroll: 1,
      viewrecords:true,
      sortable:true,
      sortname: "name",
      autowidth: true,
      pgbuttons: false,
      loadonce: true,
      gridview: true
   });

   $("#grid_clients").jqGrid("navGrid", "#pager_clients",{add:false, edit:false, del:false});

   $('#grid_clients').jqGrid('setGridParam', {datatype: 'xml'}); 
   var gridUrl = 'getgridxmlclients.php';
   $('#grid_clients').jqGrid('setGridParam', {url: gridUrl});

   // If the cookie exists, set the postData and search parameters. 
   if ($.cookies.get('gridPostData')) 
   {
      alert(dump($.cookies.get('gridPostData')));
      $('#grid_clients').jqGrid('setGridParam', {search: true, 'postData': $.cookies.get('gridPostData')});
   }

   $('#grid_clients').trigger('reloadGrid', [{page:1}]);
}

The alert for the cookie when coming back to the page looks like this:

 '_search' => "true"
 'nd' => "1313100751399"
 'rows' => "20"
 'page' => "1"
 'sidx' => "id"
 'sord' => "asc"
 'searchField' => "studycount"
 'searchString' => "1"
 'searchOper' => "eq"
 'filters' => ""

The interesting thing is that the parameters seem to have taken, because if I just click on a header to sort the grid, the filter takes affect then. I'm missing the method of forcing the filtering when reloading.

Thanks, --David