For each column of the CGridView, we can specify name, value, htmlOptions, cssClassExpression etc. In the declarations of the attributes value and cssClassExpression we can use the "special" variable $data, for example like this: 'value'=>'$data->author->username',.
Now we might want to use $data in the declaration of the htmlOptions attribute, which is normally not possible, to generate for example the tag <td id="3" class="name_3">, where 3 is the id of the data model for the current row, i.e. $data->id. That is, we want to be able to use:
'htmlOptions'=>array('id'=>'$data->id', 'class'=>'"name_{$data->id}"')
Here's a way to accomplish this...