ASP .NET MVC Disable Client Side Validation at Per-Field Level

Question

I'm using ASP .NET MVC 3 with Data Annotations and the jQuery validate plugin.

Is there a way to mark that a certain field (or certain data annotation) should only be validated server-side?

I have a phone number field with a masking plugin on it, and the regular expression validator goes crazy on the user's end. The regex is only a fail-safe (in case someone decides to hack the javascript validation), so I don't need it to run on the client side. But I'd still like the other validation to run client side.

Solution 1

I'm not sure if this solution works on MVC3. It surely works on MVC4:

You can simply disable client side validation in the Razor view prior to render the field and re-enable client side validation after the field has been rendered.

Example:

<div class="editor-field">
    @{ Html.EnableClientValidation(false); }
    @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.BatchId, new { @class = "k-textbox" })
    @{ Html.EnableClientValidation(true); }
</div>

Here we disable client side validation for the BatchId field.

Also I have developed a little helper for this:

public static class YnnovaHtmlHelper
{
    public static ClientSideValidationDisabler BeginDisableClientSideValidation(this HtmlHelper html)
    {
        return new ClientSideValidationDisabler(html);
    }
}

public class ClientSideValidationDisabler : IDisposable
{
    private HtmlHelper _html;

    public ClientSideValidationDisabler(HtmlHelper html)
    {
        _html = html;
        _html.EnableClientValidation(false);
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        _html.EnableClientValidation(true);
        _html = null;
    }
}

You will use it as follow:

<div class="editor-field">
    @using (Html.BeginDisableClientSideValidation()) {
        @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.BatchId, new { @class = "k-textbox" })
    }
</div>

If anyone has better solutions please let me know!

Hope this help.

Solution 2

You can switch off client-side unobtrusive validation for a single field by adding a data-val='false' attribute:

@Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.BatchId, new { data_val = "false" })

This will override the data-val='true' attribute that MVC adds due to any System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations attributes. The HTML element will still be decorated with other validation attributes (e.g. data-val-required) but they won't have any effect.

(Note the underscore in data_val above. MVC automatically converts underscores to hyphens in anonymous type properties, so data_val becomes data-val when rendering the HTML)

Solution 3

MVC5 use jquery.validate

http://jqueryvalidation.org/rules/

If you want to remove validations in MVC5 client-Side you need to do the following:

Remove all validations on 'myinput'

$("#myinput").rules("remove");

Specific validations

$("#myinput").rules("remove", "min max" );

Listing the validations can help

$("#myinput").rules();

Then you will need to correct your Code Behind to validate manually your model or differently because ModelState.IsValid will be false. Using ModelState.Clear() and TryValidateModel can then be handy.

Edit:

Disabling the control also remove the validations.

$("#myinput").attr('disabled', disabledValue);

Solution 4

Assuming you use default unobtrusive validation, You could use some javascript to remove rules on client side. Take a look at Plugins/Validation/rules

Solution 5

To achieve this goal in the given scenario, we need to make two tweaks.

Client Side

To disable client side validation, we need to disable it by force.

@Html.EditorFor(model => model.Password, new { htmlAttributes = new {  @data_val = "false" , @class = "form-control"} })

Notice the @data_val= “false”. It will disable the validation on this field.

Server Side (In Action)

When the model is validated on the post action, ModelState.IsValid will always return false because password is not provided. Here we have to provide the current password to the model and Re-validate the model.

var userObj = db.Users_Info.Where(a => a.Id == users_Info.Id).FirstOrDefault();
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(users_Info.Password))
{
  users_Info.Password = userObj.Password;
}
ModelState.Clear();
TryValidateModel(users_Info);

Let me explain, first we retrieve current information saved in the database which we are using later to assign to current model if password is not provided. The last two lines actually reset the ModelState to return updated result on ModelState.IsValid.

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Comments

[Ian Warburton]

Nice, except it turns validation on even if it was off to begin with.

[Lorenzo Melato]

Surely it can be enhanced!

[csharpforevermore]

Unless I put the underscore, IIS gives me an exception. Compiler Error Message: CS0746: Invalid anonymous type member declarator. Anonymous type members must be declared with a member assignment, simple name or member access.

[John Sully]

This worked like a charm and is the cleanest solution to this problem I have found yet.

[Patrick]

This works great and is the cleanest solution. Thanks!

[stephenbayer]

I got it working in a little more complicated situation, to remove an individual validation if the field has multiple validators by finding out what data attributes are added by that particular validation provider and setting them to an empty string. It's working so far. Thank you for the suggestion.

[Albert van wyk]

The @data_val does not render "data-val" in MVC 5.

[xeshu]

It works like this: @Html.EditorFor(model=>model.Phone2, new { htmlAttributes = new { data_val_number = "Must be numeric" } })

[lloyd]

This is a very good solution due to the fact of the page loading less text in the source. It noticeably improved load times due to unnecessary validation text.