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

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)