I’ve been dark for a while, but there has been a lot in the works. Hopefully there will be a flood of posts coming, most with a happier outcome than this one; however, to get back in the swing of things, I’ll take make it short and sweet.

I get really frustrated with ASP.Net Web Forms

We all know and love jQuery. It is an amazing JavaScript framework. It’s made it possible, for even the staunchest back-end developers, to get excited about writing UI. ASP.Net is the bane of jQuery enjoyment. I’ve covered this in jQuery Selectors and ASP.Net Controls. I have a new frustration: the giant HTML Form ASP.Net puts in the Web Form page.

There is an amazing jQuery validation plugin. It can do just about any validation you’ll need with minimal effort. If you want to validate a single form, it’s great; however, if you need to validate only a portion of the form, it’s a pain.

Since ASP.Net sticks its own <form> tag on the page by default, you’re pretty much screwed. The only option I’ve found so far is to go through each element, running a validation on the individual elements.

Here is an example of what I’m doing:

$().ready(function(){

	$("form").validate();	

	$("#firstname").rules("add", {
	 	minlength: 2,
		required:  true
	});

	$("#submit").click(function(){
		var valid = true;
		valid = valid && $("form").validate().element("#firstname");
		alert(valid);
   	});
});

I hope to find a better solution soon, but this will do for now.