The proper way to leverage $templateCache would be to use $http, however I'm assuming that the team chose to use $.ajax to avoid the extra overhead of a $scope.$apply(). Is this the reason? If not, perhaps it would be better to refactor to $http instead then?

I am new to angular and not aware of the $templateCache integration in in $http. That indeed seems the way to go, this was a quick fix following the existing code that I thought id post to keep this issue moving forward.

@ProLoser I think the reason was synchronicity. Elsewhere down the initiation chain, the code expects the cell templates to be there when building the grid. It does not block and wait for Ajax calls to complete.

I just tried to use $http and it all works up until the point that you actually want the content from the template in the grid. There doesn't appear to be a way to "rebuild" the grid such that the cell and header templates are reworked, unfortunately.

I think @andrewluetgers is on to the best way to handle this without rewriting a lot of ng-grid's internals. I have some unit tests that can be applied so I'll try to get them and this PR merged together.

Appears to have been fixed with 1ee01f4 in 2.0.8 branch.