jQuery unobtrusive validation in .NET MVC 3 - showing success checkmark

Question

Using jQuery unobtrusive validation within a .NET MVC project and that seems to be working fine. I'm now trying to show a green checkmark when the field validates correctly (client-side and/or remote).

Here's a sample field declaration:

    <div class="clearfix">
        @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Address1, "Street")
        <div class="input">
            @Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Address1, new { @class = "xlarge", @maxlength = "100", @placeholder = "e.g. 123 Main St" })
            <span class="help-message">
                @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Address1)
                <span class="isaok">Looks great.</span> 
            </span>
            <span class="help-block">Enter the street.</span>
        </div>
    </div>

What I'd like to do is add a class 'active' to the "span.isaok" which in turn has a checkmark for a background image.

I tried using highlight/unhighlight:

$.validator.setDefaults({
onkeyup: false,

highlight: function (element, errorClass, validClass) {
    $(element).addClass(errorClass).removeClass(validClass);
    $(element.form).find("label[for=" + element.id + "]").addClass("error");
    $(element).parent().find("span.isaok").removeClass("active");
},
unhighlight: function (element, errorClass, validClass) {
    $(element).removeClass(errorClass).addClass(validClass);
    $(element.form).find("label[for=" + element.id + "]").removeClass("error");
    if ($(element).val().length > 0) {
        $(element).parent().find("span.isaok").addClass("active");
    }
}

});

but that shows a green checkmark for all fields even if they're empty! (hence obviously wrong)

I then tried using the 'success' option but that never seems to be fired.

What am I missing?

Edit: So I found this blog post and was able to tap into the success function i.e.

$(function () {
    var settings = $.data($('form')[0], 'validator').settings;
    settings.onkeyup = false;
    settings.onfocusout = function (element) { $(element).valid(); };

    var oldErrorFunction = settings.errorPlacement;
    var oldSuccessFunction = settings.success;
    settings.errorPlacement = function (error, inputElement) {
        inputElement.parent().find("span.isaok").removeClass("active");
        oldErrorFunction(error, inputElement);
    };
    settings.success = function (label) {
        var elementId = '#' + label.attr("for");
        $(elementId).parent().find("span.isaok").addClass("active");
        oldSuccessFunction(label);
    };
});

but now if the form isn't valid it shows both the error message and the valid mark...

and the latter disappears as soon as I click anywhere on the page.

Answer 1

This appears to be an issue with the jquery.validate.unobtrusive interfering with the settings added later in $.validator.setDefault. The trick is to load the unobtrusive script after the custom settings. See here and vote to fix it here.

Answer 2

In case any one has a similar problem, I finally got this working by using the un-minified version of jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js and adding my js to the onError and onSuccess methods. Existing code was left as it. Use the re-minified version during deployment.

Thanks.

Answer 3

This is not a direct answer to your question. I am going to offer an alternative approach to this: TwitterBootstrapMVC.

With this library all you'd have to write for each input is:

@Html.Bootstrap().ControlGroup().TextBoxFor(m => m.Address1)

And that's it. You will have label, input, and validation message - all taken care of, without javascript. It generates proper html mark up for you. You just need to make sure that you have proper standard css for classes like .field-validation-error, .field-validation-valid...