jQuery Validate - Enable validation for hidden fields

Solution 1:

The plugin's author says you should use "square brackets without the quotes", []

http://bassistance.de/2011/10/07/release-validation-plugin-1-9-0/

Release: Validation Plugin 1.9.0: "...Another change should make the setup of forms with hidden elements easier, these are now ignored by default (option “ignore” has “:hidden” now as default). In theory, this could break an existing setup. In the unlikely case that it actually does, you can fix it by setting the ignore-option to “[]” (square brackets without the quotes)."

To change this setting for all forms:

$.validator.setDefaults({ 
    ignore: [],
    // any other default options and/or rules
});

(It is not required that .setDefaults() be within the document.ready function)

OR for one specific form:

$(document).ready(function() {

    $('#myform').validate({
        ignore: [],
        // any other options and/or rules
    });

});

EDIT:

See this answer for how to enable validation on some hidden fields but still ignore others.

EDIT 2:

Before leaving comments that "this does not work", keep in mind that the OP is simply asking about the jQuery Validate plugin and his question has nothing to do with how ASP.NET, MVC, or any other Microsoft framework can alter this plugin's normal expected behavior. If you're using a Microsoft framework, the default functioning of the jQuery Validate plugin is over-written by Microsoft's unobtrusive-validation plugin.

If you're struggling with the unobtrusive-validation plugin, then please refer to this answer instead: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11053251/594235

Solution 2:

This worked for me, within an ASP.NET MVC3 site where I'd left the framework to setup unobtrusive validation etc., in case it's useful to anyone:

$("form").data("validator").settings.ignore = "";

Solution 3:

Make sure to put

 $.validator.setDefaults({ ignore: '' });

NOT inside $(document).ready

Solution 4:

So I'm going to go a bit deeper in to why this doesn't work because I'm the kind of person that can't sleep at night without knowing haha. I'm using jQuery validate 1.10 and Microsoft jQuery Unobtrusive Validation 2.0.20710.0 which was published on 1/29/2013.

I started by searching for the setDefaults method in jQuery Validate and found it on line 261 of the unminified file. All this function really does is merge your json settings in to the existing $.validator.defaults which are initialized with the ignore property being set to ":hidden" along with the other defaults defined in jQuery Validate. So at this point we've overridden ignore. Now let's see where this defaults property is being referenced at.

When I traced through the code to see where $.validator.defaults is being referenced. I noticed that is was only being used by the constructor for a form validator, line 170 in jQuery validate unminified file.

// constructor for validator
$.validator = function( options, form ) {
    this.settings = $.extend( true, {}, $.validator.defaults, options );
    this.currentForm = form;
    this.init();
};

At this point a validator will merge any default settings that were set and attach it to the form validator. When you look at the code that is doing the validating, highlighting, unhighlighting, etc they all use the validator.settings object to pull the ignore property. So we need to make sure if we are to set the ignore with the setDefaults method then it has to occur before the $("form").validate() is called.

If you're using Asp.net MVC and the unobtrusive plugin, then you'll realize after looking at the javascript that validate is called in document.ready. I've also called my setDefaults in the document.ready block which is going to execute after the scripts, jquery validate and unobtrusive because I've defined those scripts in the html before the one that has the call in it. So my call obviously had no impact on the default functionality of skipping hidden elements during validation. There is a couple of options here.

Option 1 - You could as Juan Mellado pointed out have the call outside of the document.ready which would execute as soon as the script has been loaded. I'm not sure about the timing of this since browsers are now capable of doing parallel script loading. If I'm just being over cautious then please correct me. Also, there's probably ways around this but for my needs I did not go down this path.

Option 2a - The safe bet in my eyes is to just replace the $.validator.setDefaults({ ignore: '' }); inside of the document.ready event with $("form").data("validator").settings.ignore = "";. This will modify the ignore property that is actually used by jQuery validate when doing each validation on your elements for the given form.

Options 2b - After looking in to the code a bit more you could also use $("form").validate().settings.ignore = ""; as a way of setting the ignore property. The reason is that when looking at the validate function it checks to see if a validator object has already been stored for the form element via the $.data() function. If it finds a validator object stored with the form element then it just returns the validator object instead of creating another one.