I have a CDbActiveRecord setup and I have a instance of the CGridView class setup as a widget. 
Basically my end game is I need a table, but each row to contain the primary key of the row associated with the Active Record. 
Such as: 
<tr id="123"> <td> Column value 1 </td> <td> Col 2 </td> <td> Col 3 </td> </tr> 
That's the specific of the row that I'm looking for. 
Here's the code I've got so far to produce a table. (The json variable is set because this is inside a controller and the widget is returned as json.) 
// get the content id for the version list
$contentID_v = Yii::app()->request->getParam("id"); 
// setup the criteria to fetch related items 
$versionCdbCriteria = new CDbCriteria;
$versionCdbCriteria->compare("contentID",$contentID_v); 
// setting up the active data provider for the version 
$vActiveDP = new CActiveDataProvider("FactsheetcontentVersion", array(
    "criteria" => $versionCdbCriteria,
    'pagination' => array('PageSize' => $this->paginationSize),
    'keyAttribute'=>'vID',
));
$json_data .= $this->widget('zii.widgets.grid.CGridView', array(
        'dataProvider' => $vActiveDP,
        'columns' => array(
        'title',
        'created',
        'createdBy'
        ),
    'showTableOnEmpty' => 'false', 
),true);
This is what it produces for my active record. 
 <div class="grid-view" id="yw0">
<div class="summary">Displaying 1-1 of 1 result(s).</div>
<table class="items"><thead>
    <tr><th id="yw0_c0">Factsheettitle</th>
        <th id="yw0_c1"><a href="jq/work/admin/index.php?r=factsheetManager/Editor
        &id=25601&getV=true&_=1341694154760&FactsheetcontentVersion_sort=created">Created</a>
        </th>
        <th id="yw0_c2"><a href="jq/work/admin/index.php?r=factsheetManager/
        Editor&id=25601&getV=true&_=1341694154760&FactsheetcontentVersion_sort=createdBy">Created By</a>
        </th>
    </tr></thead>
<tbody><tr class="odd"><td>Distribution</td><td>0000-00-00 00:00:00</td><td>NULL</td></tr></tbody>
</table>
<div title="jq/work/admin/index.php?r=factsheetManager/Editor&id=12&id=25601&getV=true&_=1341694154760" style="display:none" class="keys"><span>8</span></div>
</div>