I feel like I am missing something so simple, but have to ask it here as I cannot find answers anywhere.

Lets say we have a simple customer search page, with a textfield and a gridpanel to show results.
On the page, we have the model as @model List<Customer> The gridpanel's datasource is the model.
(we are seeing this in 'Editable GridPanel With Save To [DirectMethod]' in your examples)

Since we have not searched yet, the model is empty. Once a user clicks search button, we want to go to controller, get List<Customer> results, and repopulate the model through a direct event/method.

It seems like you should be able to do something like return this.Direct(model) and this would pass the model back to the view and the store would load the results. But this is not working. The only way we can get it to work is to do Ext.getCmp(store) and store.LoadData(model). We are trying to avoid using getCmp and also do not want to use a partial view.

It seems like something very common and simple, and any advice would be appreciated...