>>This is an interesting question - the code in the controller is auto-generated (we then add more logic). Why it is set this way I am not sure myself.
>>
>>Also, yesterday I commented out the paging options and enablePaging and still the behavior was the same. So, the problem is not in the paging, the problem is that when my data change, somehow grid doesn't react and display them. Only by switching to dev tools I can get it to react to that new data set.
>
>In an MVVM situation which from my reading is what Angular Js is all about, for a control to update, it has to be notified that the underlying binding has been changed. In Silverlight/wpf that is handled by INotifyPropertyChanged and all works great. I'm sure there is a similar mechanism in Angular which you are not calling after mucking around with sort, etc.

Yes, I was thinking about it too yesterday that I have to explicitly call something now. I'm going to do some research in this direction today.

I found this related question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17529559/angularjs-ng-grid-updating-array-with-splice-doesnt-updates-ui

It is more than a year old, so I don't know if this is still a problem. I can look into the source code, though.