I faced the same issue lately .. and worked out the following solution:
instead of giving your additional form validation (apart from the unobtrusive mvc 3 validation) as a separate/second submit handler in form "onsubmit" event, you should "inject" your additional validation function in the main unobtrusive validation process of mvc3.. let it take care of the rest.
Create a custom validation adaptor somewhere in your common javascript code/file:
(function ($) {
if($.validator && $.validator.unobtrusive) {
$.validator.unobtrusive.adapters.addBool("AdditionalFormValidation");
}
} (jQuery));
In your view file, where you have the form, add this code to create a new jquery validator method for the custom validator adaptor that you defined in your common file above:
(function ($) {
if ($.validator) {
$.validator.addMethod("AdditionalFormValidation", function (value, element) {
return Validation();
});
}
} (jQuery));
Here
- "AdditionalFormValidation" is the validator method name same as your custom validation adaptor.
- "Validation" is the name of your javascript function that takes care of your additional validation and returns a boolean result for validation successs or failure.
In your form, remove the "onsubmit" handler that you had supplied, add a invisible dummy text field to your form and apply the custom unobtrusive validation adaptor/rule that you created, as given below:
@using (Html.BeginForm(MVC.Booking.Actions.AtWork(model: null), FormMethod.Post))
{
@Html.Partial(MVC.Booking.Views._BookForAtWork)
<input type="text" style="visibility:hidden; width: 1px; height: 1px;" name="hiddenValidation" id="hiddenValidation" data-val="true" data-val-AdditionalFormValidation />
}
This solution worked like a charm for me. To me appears a cleaner solution as it injects the additional validation in the same unobtrusive validation flow of mvc3 rather than creating a second validation flow. Also it is inline to future improvement for creating custom data annotation (validations) for all the custom client side validation work.