Question

I have a form that needs to be validated but it does not have a submit button.
So to get the validation done, I followed the example on http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Validation/valid

which tells to call .valid() function.
So i added the following code which worked fine:

            $(".getcars").click(function() {
                valid = $("#form1").valid();
                if(valid){
                    ajaxCall();
                }

            }); 

Now I want to add more rules to the validation field , so i tried

jQuery.validator.addMethod("lettersandnumonly", function(value, element) {
                return this.optional(element) || /^[0-9A-Za-z]+$/i.test(value);
                    }, "Letters and numbers only ");
jQuery.validator.addMethod("nowhitespace", function(value, element) {
                return this.optional(element) || /^\S+$/i.test(value);
            }, "No white space please"); 

            $(".getcars").click(function() {
                valid = $("#form1").valid(
                {
                rules: {
                    postal_code: {
                        maxlength: 6,
                        lettersandnumonly: true,
                        nowhitespace: true
                    }
                }
            });
                if(valid){
                    ajaxCall();
                }

            });

but this is not working. Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong while adding the rule?

Answer 1

rule definitions go in the initial call to validate(). Since valid() only works on forms that have had validate() called on them, I’m assuming you have a line in the code somewhere calling validate():

$("#form1").validate();

All you should have to do is move your rule definitions into that initial call:

$("#form1").validate({
    rules: {
        postal_code: {
            maxlength: 6,
            lettersandnumonly: true,
            nowhitespace: true
        }
    }
});

… And then call .valid() later like you were doing initially:

$(".getcars").click(function() {
    valid = $("#form1").valid();
    if(valid) {
        ajaxCall();
    }
});