>>>>>I found this question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17529559/angularjs-ng-grid-updating-array-with-splice-doesnt-updates-ui which perhaps is relevant to my case.
>>>>>
>>>>>Unfortunately, I can not check if it's relevant or not as we only have ng-grid.min.js in our project. I am not exactly sure where to try implementing the copy solution suggested in the second answer.
>>>>
>>>>You could try:

var pagedData = angular.copy(data.slice((page - 1) * pageSize, page * pageSize));

>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>BTW, I posted all the code which I currently have in that controller (aside from the few irrelevant methods). May be you can spot the problem right away.
>>>
>>>Ok, weird thing. After I believe that change worked fine, I downloaded the latest ng-grid using nuget. I applied the fix suggested in that thread (I only found one place where this code was called).
>>>
>>>It stopped working again :(
>>>
>>>I then re-applied your suggested fix which seemed to fix the problem originally. It didn't fix it this time and I again see the same exact problem :(
>>>
>>>This is getting extremely frustrating :(
>>
>>Can you post the change you made to the grid js ?
>>(Won't get time to look at it now tho - it's pub time here :-})
>
>The fix I made in the version
>
>

>/***********************************************
>* ng-grid JavaScript Library
>* Authors: https://github.com/angular-ui/ng-grid/blob/master/README.md 
>* License: MIT (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php)
>* Compiled At: 08/04/2014 16:09
>***********************************************

>
>here
>
>

> $scope.$on('$destroy', $scope.$parent.$watch(options.data, dataWatcher, true));

>
>I added the last parameter true as suggested in the
>https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17529559/angularjs-ng-grid-updating-array-with-splice-doesnt-updates-ui
>
>This didn't help and re-applying your original fix in SetPagingData also didn't help.

So does using the suggestion to copy slice still work with the unmodified ng-grid.js ?

If it does I'd tend to stick with that. Having ng-grid perform a deep watch is expensive and the mod will mean it will always be creating a copy even in situations where it is unnecessary.

If you do need an app wide solution then maybe an alternative would be to use $watchCollection() instead of $watch() in ng-grid ? I'm no angular expert but I think that would be less expensive.

IAC, if you're trying the ng-grid mod then, since you have a source version, you can debug - check if the watch is firing when you expect, compare newVal/oldVal etc.