I have a very large Form with many date fields that need to be validated. For the most part, this is pretty straight-forward to do with the jQuery Validation plug-in. But I have found a use-case, where I am not exactly sure that the “correct” design decision is:
I have a date-field whose value is by default an abstract example :
<input id="date_field" name="date_1" class="" type="text" value="tt.mm.jjjj" maxlength="10"/>
I want this field to be optional. So in the validator option I declare:
date_field: {date: true}
Ofcourse this isn’t correct, because if the user hasn’t entered anything and thus left the default “dd.mm.yyyy” value, the validator will check to see if the value is a date, which it’s not and throw an error.
I could write my own custom date validator that just adds the “dd.mm.jjjj” to the list of correct dates.
But in a different use case in the same form, I have a field that is both a date and required. If I used the custom validator on this field, then the form would validate even if the user hasn’t entered anything on his own. But because the custom validator allows for the “dd.mm.jjjj” String to be accepted , and that string field is obviously not empty, the form would be accepted.
So, the way I see it the optimal solution would be to “extend” the cases that the validator interprets a field as beeing empty.
In other words I would like to say to the validator: “Hey, date fields are also empty if they have this string as a value”.
Unfortunatelly my jQuery/ Javascript skills are somewhat limited and my attemts have so far failed to construct anything like the above.
On the other hand, this must be a pretty common problem but I haven’t found a documented solution to it. So maybe I am missing something?
Thank you!
I ended up just extending jQuery Validator with my own custom “required” rule, just like the localization of “date” does. Was pretty obvious:)