unobtrusive validation - How to clear jquery validate errors

Question

I'm hijaxing an existing form and POSTing to the server. jQuery validate does most of the validation but if validation fails on the server we return the errors to the client as JSON.

Below is the code that does that:

<script type="text/javascript">

    $(function () {

        $("form").submit(function (e) {
            var $form = $(this);
            var validator = $form.data("validator");

            if (!validator || !$form.valid())
                return;

            e.preventDefault();

            $.ajax({
                url: "@Url.Action("index")",
                type: "POST",
                data: $form.serialize(),
                statusCode: {
                    400: function(xhr, status, err) {                           
                        var errors = $.parseJSON(err);
                        validator.showErrors(errors);
                    }
                },
                success: function() {
                    // clear errors
                    // validator.resetForm();
                    // just reload the page for now
                    location.reload(true);
                }
            });
        });

    });

</script>

The problem is I can't seem to clear the validation errors if the POST is successful. I've tried calling validator.resetForm() but this makes no difference, the error messages added by the showError() call, are still displayed.

Note I'm also using the jQuery.validate.unobtrusive plugin.

Answer 1

You posted this a while ago, I don't know if you managed to solve it? I had the same problem with jQuery validate and the jQuery.validate.unobtrusive plugin.

After examining the source code and some debugging, I came to the conclusion that the problem comes from the way the unobtrusive plugin handles error messages. It removes the errorClass that the jQuery.validate plugin sets, and so when the form is reset, jQuery validate cannot find the error labels to remove.

I did not want to modify the code of the plugins, so I was able to overcome this in the following way:

// get the form inside we are working - change selector to your form as needed
var $form = $("form");

// get validator object
var $validator = $form.validate();

// get errors that were created using jQuery.validate.unobtrusive
var $errors = $form.find(".field-validation-error span");

// trick unobtrusive to think the elements were succesfully validated
// this removes the validation messages
$errors.each(function(){ $validator.settings.success($(this)); })

// clear errors from validation
$validator.resetForm();

note: I use the $ prefix for variables to denote variables that contain jQuery objects.