It would be useful to be able to set the sorting of the grid programmatically.

In my particular scenario we have an existing system which is very flexible and has user created entities. We already have the idea of "view definitions" which are used to define how a list of entities (for example companies or contacts) is displayed in a grid format. This view definition contains our own version of sort descriptors to tell us what the initial sorting should be.

I am getting the data using our existing API in the ReadItems method. Because I already have the view definition I can pass our sort descriptor to our API and it returns the data pre-sorted (it also handles paging). I would then like to be able to tell the grid which columns I have sorted by so it could be represented in the UI with the arrow. The grid doesn't actually have to sort the data.

Here is a more detailed description of the case: https://www.telerik.com/forums/grid-questions-07d1fe846889#RgZmmE2avUaSOsIcprdOMg.