Using JQuery Validation plugin with ASP.NET

Like everyone else, I’ve been playing around with JQuery a lot lately. Asp.net and JQuery are not the best friends in the world but I guess it will be a lot better when using ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft also announced that they will support JQuery natively in future versions. Nice!

If you want to learn more about ASP.NET and Jquery be sure to read both Rick Sthral’s and the Encosia blogs.

I’m working on a new project now where I am trying to stay away from asp.net ajax mainly because of performance reasons but also just because I want to learn something new. Today I’ve been using the JQuery Validation plugin.

There is a lot of documentation on how to use it on the documentation pages for the plugin but I want to share with you one thing that I had problems with.

This is some regular example code that all the samples use. The problem here is that for example “EmailTextbox” is not the ID of the control but the name.

$(document).ready(function() {
// validate signup form on keyup and submit
$("#aspnetForm").validate({
   rules: {
       OpenIdTextbox: "required",
       NicknameTextbox: {
          required: true,
          remote: "resources/nickname.aspx"
          },
       EmailTextbox: {
          required: true,
          email: true
          }
       }
    });
});

I scratched my head for a long long time when I used ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_EmailTextbox and nothing worked at all. So what you have to do is change this to something like this.

$(document).ready(function() {
 // validate signup form on keyup and submit
 $("#aspnetForm").validate({
     rules: {
         ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$OpenIdTextbox: "required",
         ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$NicknameTextbox: {
             required: true,
             remote: "resources/nickname.aspx"
         },
         ctl00$ContentPlaceHolder1$EmailTextbox: {
             required: true,
             email: true
         }
     }
 });
});

You could of course also use some method that rewrites the Control.UniqueID to a name and use <%= %> to get the name of the control.