ASP.NET MVC Unobtrusive validation - why form context is needed?

Question

I\'m trying to enable unobtrusive javascript validation for dynamically created items. The problem with javascript was already solved in another SO question and this is not the

Answer 1

You could manually fake a form context. For example if you had some partial view which doesn't contain a <form> element and which is called using AJAX to regenerate some input elements you could do this:

@model MyViewModel
@{
    ViewContext.FormContext = new FormContext();
}

@Html.LabelFor(x => x.Foo)
@Html.EditorFor(x => x.Foo)
@Html.ValidationMessageFor(x => x.Foo)

The corresponding input elements will now posses the data-* attributes. But that might not be enough. If you are only refreshing (using AJAX) only a portion of the <form> but not actually replacing the form element in the DOM calling $.validator.unobtrusive.parse wouldn't suffice. You need to remove any previous validations associated to this element:

success: function(result) {
    // we are replacing only a portion of the form
    $('#somePartOfTheForm').html(result);

    $('form').removeData('validator');
    $('form').removeData('unobtrusiveValidation');
    $.validator.unobtrusive.parse('form');   
}