jQuery Validation: Adding Errors to the Error Containter… With Love!

Hello again, my wonderful audience, I have something great and fun planned for this post. If you read this post you might have been left wondering how to add custom messages to the error holder. It’s ok if you did, there’s nothing wrong with being confused all the time. It’s what makes you so adorable.

Say you have a form like this, and if you don’t I cry endlessly for your loss. My heart goes out to you.

<form id="ILoveEverythingForm">
    <div id="NotSoNiceThingsDiv" style="display:none;"></div>
	...
</form>

As you can see, there is an error div to hold mean things that we have to print out because the system just doesn’t like the user. As we both know, the user can’t help but be dumb. It’s just in his cute little nature. And that nature is just so darned cute.

Now let’s assume that you have something that sent back a bunch of mean messages when you tried to validate server side after all the cute client side validation was done. You might have a method to take in those jerk face messages. How do you display them in the bad place?

  function updateErrorDivContentWithLove(messages)
  {
    if(messages.length > 0)
    {
      var validator = jQuery('#ILoveEverythingForm').validate();

      for(var loopCounter = 0; loopCounter < messages.length; loopCounter ++)
      {
        validator.showErrors
        (
          {
             'SomeWonderfulElementName' : messages[loopCounter].Message
          }
        );
      }
    }
  }

Awwww kitties!

Only thing that may seem odd (And if it doesn’t, don’t worry you are still very special and loved in this world):

  'SomeElementName' : messages[loopCounter].Message

Not sure what element really needs to be here, basically anything in the form with a name tag. So if you’re good like I know you are, you have at least one element in that little old form with a name property set. I would say that this is pretty useless in situations where all the errors are shown in one div, as opposed to right next to the element, but that would be mean and I don’t do that.

Now I know you wanted something special from this post so I just wanted you to know that even though most of the world considers you hideous, I say you should be proud of being hideous because it makes you who you are. A unique miracle that only really has issues with dogs and small children. Embrace yourself in whatever way you take that!