This tutorial shows how to filter CListView items by AJAX, and it's compatible with disabled JavaScript users
In my case this has been done to filter users list
This wiki is a step-by-step example explaining how the controller, model and the view's CGridView work together. It explains simple things - as well as more complex things that you will anyway quickly have to know. So, even if you don't use dynamic gridviews, take a morning off and thoroughly work through this tutorial. It should save you lots of struggling.
This example uses a MySQL DB with a table named tree with the fields id, name, and parent_id. The parent_id will be NULL for root elements. The SQL is kept simple (no autoinc, no FK, etc).
As I'm new to the framework (2 weeks) - I tried to build a functionallity I already use a lot in my old framework (PRADO). This means combining a GridView with a form. And this in one page, what allows you to select a record from the grid and view the values in the same page without jumping to a new page.
In doing internet searches trying to learn how to incorporated ajax into web pages generated by the yii framework I noticed that there seems to be a lot of confusion. I worry that too-clever hacks will be broken in upgrades of the framework.