jqGrid 4.4.4 is more as five and half years old! It isn't supported since a long time. I guess that you get jqGrid 4.4.4 via NuGet package jQuery.jqGrid. In the case, I'd recommend you uninstall the package and install free-jqGrid 4.15.4 instead. After that you can use formatter: "actions" or template: "actions".
If you still want to understand how you can implement your requirements using custom formatter, then you have some alternatives. The first way would be to use your old code, but to modify the call of editRow (or saveRow)
return "<a href='javascript:void(0)' class='anchor usergroup_name link' onclick=\"editRow('" + rowobject.id + "')\">" + 'edit' + "</a>" +" | "
+"<a href='javascript:void(0)' class='anchor usergroup_name link' onClick=\"saveRow('" + rowobject.id + "')\">" + 'save' + "</a>";
to
return "<a href='javascript:void(0)' class='anchor usergroup_name link' onclick=\"editRow.call(this,'" + rowobject.id + "')\">edit</a>"+
"<a style='display:none' href='javascript:void(0)' class='anchor usergroup_name link' onClick=\"saveRow.call(this,'" + rowobject.id + "')\">save</a>";
onclick method will be called with this initialized to the DOM element of <a>, which the user clicked.
Inside of your global functions editRow and saveRow you can use $(this).next().show(); or $(this).prev().show(); to show the second link and to use $(this).hide() to hide the current link. The simplest code of editRow and saveRow could be the following:
function editRow (rowid) {
$(this).hide()
.next().show()
.closest(".ui-jqgrid-btable").jqGrid("editRow", rowid);
}
function saveRow (rowid) {
$(this).hide()
.prev().show()
.closest(".ui-jqgrid-btable").jqGrid("saveRow", rowid);
}
One more way will be don't use any inline onclick attributes at all. The click event supports event bubbling. It means that a click inside of any DOM element of the grid propagates the event the the tree of parents. Thus it's enough to define click event on the main <table> element of the grid. jqGrid does that already. One can use beforeSelectRow callback function which will be called inside of click event handler registered by jqGrid. The target property of the Event object (the second parameter of beforeSelectRow) will be the clicked element. Thus you can just verify whether e.target has the class usergroup_name, which you use for your links and, if it's so, do your main job: start editRow (or saveRow), hide/show the links and so on. Look at the old answer, which demonstrates the approach.
