Why does form validation not work in MVC3 partial views? - asp.net-mvc-3

Question

Anybody? There is another question regarding this but the only answers were to code up some javascript validation, which also refuses to work on my partial view ("$ is not defined").
Anyway, I don't want to use javascript I just want simple validation for required fields that cannot be left blank, number fields that require ints, etc.
Can anyone shed some light on validation and partial views?

Answer 1

I suspect that you are loading those partial views using AJAX. If this is the case you will need to manually invoke the $.validator.unobtrusive.parse method once you inject the new contents of the partial into the DOM as explained in this article.
Brad Wilson also discussed this in his blog post:
The unobtrusive client validation script automatically parses the
initial set of HTML for validation rules when the page has finished
loading. If your page dynamically adds new HTML content (perhaps
throught Ajax or through client-side application code), you may wish
to parse that new HTML for client validation on the new HTML elements.
To parse new HTML, you can call the
jQuery.validator.unobtrusive.parse() method, passing it a selector for
the HTML that you would like to be parsed. You can also call the
jQuery.validator.unobtrusive.parseElement() function to parse a single
HTML element.
As far as the $ is not defined error you should make sure that you have included the proper scripts:
<script src="#Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.5.1.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="#Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="#Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>
Also make sure you are not referencing any of the Microsoft*.js scripts. They are obsolete and should no longer be used in ASP.NET MVC 3.
Of course that's only a supposition, you haven't shown any code so we cannot know what you are doing.

Answer 2

I'm having the same problem and i found that it's not possible to call $.validator.unobtrusive.parse() on the same form twice.
When loading the form initially from the server the form is parsed automatically by the unobtrusive library. When you add an input element dynamically to the form and call $.validator.unobtrusive.parse() again, it won't work. The same goes for parseElement().
So before you call $.validator.unobtrusive.parse, remove the original validator and unobtrusive validation from the form like so:
success: function (html) {
$("#div-id").append(html);
var form = $("#div-id").closest("form");
form.removeData('validator');
form.removeData('unobtrusiveValidation');
$.validator.unobtrusive.parse($("#editorRows"));
}