rmurphey

adventures in javascript consulting
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I am a JavaScript application developer and consultant,
working to help clients write client-side applications that treat
JavaScript as a rich and powerful language, not a toy. I'm the
co-host of the rollicking yayQuery podcast, the organizer of the unexpectedly epic TXJS, a contributor to the jQuery Cookbook from O'Reilly, and the author of jQuery Fundamentals. I'm also active in trying to get more women to participate in the tech community, even if it means I have to get up on stage myself. I live in Durham, North Carolina, with my partner, two dogs, and two terrible cats.

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form validation

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jQuery validation: Indicate that at least one element in a group is required

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I had a need today to indicate that at least one of a set of input fields was required. I was hoping there was a direct way to do this in the jQuery validation plugin; while the method isn't quite as straightforward as I was wishing for, it's still fairly simple. To start with, I put class="required_group" on each of the elements in the group. Then, I added a custom validation method: 

jQuery.validator.addMethod('required_group', function(val, el) {
        var $module = $(el).parents('div.panel');
        return $module.find('.required_group:filled').length;
});
... a custom class rule to take advantage of the new method: 
jQuery.validator.addClassRules('required_group', {
        'required_group' : true
});
... and finally a custom message for the new method: 
jQuery.validator.messages.required_group = 'Please fill out at least one of these fields.';
What I'd love to see is a way to specify a dependent group without using a custom class rule, but I'm not sure what this would look like, as all validation rules are either keyed off an element's class or the presence of the element's name in the rules object. Thoughts? I'm open to the possibility that there's a far better way to solve this --

Filed under  //  form validation   jquery   plugins  
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