Question

I have a rather large ASPX form with lots of textboxes and drop down lists to fill in. Most of the textboxes have RequiredFieldValidator controls and these work just fine.

However, I have 3 textboxes for Home, Mobile and Work Telephone numbers. Each textbox is optional but if it is filled in, then the value must be numeric. I don’t need to validate the format of the phone number at this point, only ensure that it is numeric.

The client side code for one of the fields looks like so:

<asp:Label ID="lblWorkPhone" runat="server" AssociatedControlID="txtWorkPhone" Text="<%$ Resources: Registration, WorkPhone %>" /><br />
<asp:TextBox ID="txtWorkPhone" runat="server" />
<asp:CustomValidator ID="validateWorkPhone" runat="server" 
                            ValidationGroup="reg" ControlToValidate="txtWorkPhone" ForeColor="Red" 
                            ErrorMessage="<%$ Resources: Registration, HomePhoneNumber %>" 
                            Text="<%$ Resources: Registration, RequireMessage %>" 
                            onservervalidate="validateWorkPhone_ServerValidate" />

The server side validation method is here :

protected void validateWorkPhone_ServerValidate(object source, ServerValidateEventArgs args)
{
    long temp = 0;

    long.TryParse(txtWorkPhone.Text, out temp);

    if (temp == 0)
    {
        args.IsValid = false;
        validateWorkPhone.IsValid = true;
    }
    else
    {
        args.IsValid = true;
        validateWorkPhone.IsValid = false;
    }
}

As far as I can tell the server side validation method is not firing at all. All the other validation controls on the page do seem to work fine.

Can anybody help?

Answer 1

Are the client-side validators (such as the RequiredFieldValidators) valid? The server-side validators only fire when all the client-side ones are valid.

EDIT
Most validators, such as RequiredFieldValidator or RegularExpressionValidator, perform the validation both client-side and server side. When the client-side validation fails, the submit is cancelled so a server-side-only validation doesn’t fire.

For a CustomValidator you will have to add a client-side validation explicitly, if you want that.