ASP .NET MVC Disable Client Side Validation at Per-Field Level

Question

I'm using ASP .NET MVC 3 with Data Annotations and the jQuery validate plugin.

Is there a way to mark that a certain field (or certain data annotation) should only be validated server-side?

I have a phone number field with a masking plugin on it, and the regular expression validator goes crazy on the user's end. The regex is only a fail-safe (in case someone decides to hack the javascript validation), so I don't need it to run on the client side. But I'd still like the other validation to run client side.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this solution works on MVC3. It surely works on MVC4:

You can simply disable client side validation in the Razor view prior to render the field and re-enable client side validation after the field has been rendered.

Example:

<div class="editor-field">
    @{ Html.EnableClientValidation(false); }
    @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.BatchId, new { @class = "k-textbox" })
    @{ Html.EnableClientValidation(true); }
</div>

Here we disable client side validation for the BatchId field.

Also I have developed a little helper for this:

public static class YnnovaHtmlHelper
{
    public static ClientSideValidationDisabler BeginDisableClientSideValidation(this HtmlHelper html)
    {
        return new ClientSideValidationDisabler(html);
    }
}

public class ClientSideValidationDisabler : IDisposable
{
    private HtmlHelper _html;

    public ClientSideValidationDisabler(HtmlHelper html)
    {
        _html = html;
        _html.EnableClientValidation(false);
    }

    public void Dispose()
    {
        _html.EnableClientValidation(true);
        _html = null;
    }
}

You will use it as follow:

<div class="editor-field">
    @using (Html.BeginDisableClientSideValidation()) {
        @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.BatchId, new { @class = "k-textbox" })
    }
</div>

If anyone has better solutions please let me know!

Hope this help.