Question

I have a jquery to validate my drop down. if ‘yes’ on radio box i can select from dropdown. if ‘no’ on radio box dropdown is greyed out.

If a both radio boxes are ‘yes’ and value in both dropdowns are ‘please select’ and submit button is clicked, a validation error occurs and DOES NOT redirect to index.html.

If one radio box is at ‘yes’ & dropdown ‘please select’ and the other at ‘no’ with value ‘red’ from dropdown and submit button is clicked a validation error occors and redirect to index.html. Obviously this defeats the purpose of a validation.

I hope someone can help as its driving me mad.!

I have narrowed it down to this being the probem:

});      
       $("input:submit").click(function(){         
           var retVal = false;
           $.each([1, 2], function(i, val){
              retVal = (validate(val) || retVal);
           });
            return retVal;   
       });

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, you have a validate() function (which you don’t show) which validates the specified item and returns true if OK or false if invalid. On submit you want to call validate() for several items, and if any of them return false return false to the submit (conversely, return true only if all the validations are true.

The way your existing code sets retVal, once it becomes true it will stay true because any boolean result from validate() ORed with true will be true. Try this instead:

       $("input:submit").click(function(){         
           var retVal = true;
           $.each([1, 2], function(i, val){
              retVal = validate(val) && retVal;
           });
            return retVal;   
       });

This starts with a default return of true, and then changes it to false if validate(val) returns false. Using && instead of || then means that once retVal is false it will stay false. In my opinion it would be clearer to just get rid of the && altogether and say:

if (!validate(val)) retVal = false;