jQuery.validate – Setting default ignore rules

Note: This post is from my old blog (2010-03-10)

I’ve been trying to setup jQuery.validate so that it ignores hidden elements on the form. By hidden I mean that the element is not visible; not that it is an input of type hidden.

The definition of defaults.ignore is an array…

ignore: []

… so I pushed my “:hidden” string into the array… but that didn’t work.
This setting is eventually passed to the jQuery .not() function like this:

.not( this.settings.ignore )

So by assigning a string to the defaults like this:

jQuery.validator.defaults.ignore = ":hidden";

The string “:hidden” will be passed to the jQuery .not() function when selecting valid form elements and the elements that are non visible (match the selector “:hidden”) will be ignored during validation…