Fix: jQuery’s jqGrid search UI custom styling

Lately, I’ve got the task of maintaining/extending an ASP.net MVC web application that is using jQuery’s jqGrid for data grids on its UI. First thing I noticed was how confusing the search UI on the grid’s header was:

Those symbols on the left-side of each column’s searchbox are for the type of search (e.g. contains, doesn’t contain, equals, starts with, doesn’t start with, ends with, doesn’t end with).

Bit too many options and using programming-related symbols that probably intimidate several users in my opinion:

But the worse is the “x” button (that clears the searchbox) on the right of each searchbox, that combined with the search-type symbols makes the whole search bar look like some strange mathematical expression.

So using the browser dev tools (F12) and some CSS rules I quickly restyled that search bar to make it more appealing UI/UX wise:

Added a border around the “x” button that clears the searchbox and offseted using a negative margin so that the searchbox and it fuse together visually on their sides. Also made the search-type symbol (that opens the search-type selection popup when clicked) of lighter color. It may look a bit-like some disabled thing like that, but at least it should confuse average users less with its use of technical symbols like that.

Just need to add the rules above at the ASP.net MVC app’s Site.css (probably to be found at the Content subfolder of the webapp) and remember to press F5/Refresh in one’s browser in case the old styling still appears due to caching.

Update #1:

I noticed on older versions of Windows (other than Windows 10 that is) that bevels were showing at the text inputs, leading to this ugly effect:

So I had to add some more rules to remove the bevel borders and use a consistent border color.

Removing the bevels seemed to also remove the inner padding of the text inputs, so added a padding of 2px and some box-sizing rules to make sure the padding doesn’t affect the input’s size.

/* OS-independent styling for input and textarea borders */
textarea,
input[type="text"],
input[type="password"] {
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 1px;
    border-color: gray;
    padding: 2px;
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; /* Safari/Chrome, other WebKit */
    -moz-box-sizing: border-box; /* Firefox, other Gecko */
    box-sizing: border-box; /* Opera/IE 8+ */
}

Update #2:

After recently updating some jQuery related NuGet packages in that ASP.net project, I noticed the [x] button was showing a bit higher up at the bottom compared to the search box. The fix to that was to add padding-bottom: 1px; at the CSS declaration for clearsearchclass in Content/Site.css

a.clearsearchclass {
    border-width: 1px;
    border-style: solid;
    /* border-left-style: none; */
    margin-left: -3px;
    padding-bottom: 1px; /* seems to be needed with newer jQuery.UI */
    background: whitesmoke;
    border-color: gray;
}