Problem/Motivation
At the moment we only have #limit_validation_errors for form elements of type button and submit. Using it it is possible to turn off validation completly or enable it only for desired regions. But there is no option to say what should not be validated.
Let's look at a simple example.
We have a form structure, which enables us to add more items to the form through ajax. Each of this items might have a required field. When the user submits the ajax call to add another item the form is automatically validated and if the user decided first to generate couple of items and then fill out the required fields in each of them, she will not be able to do this, as she is going to get error saying that some of the fields are required and a new item will not be generated.
Now the developer has the option to suppress the whole validation with setting
#limit_validation_errors = array()
But by using this even the custom validation introduced by the developer will be suppressed, e.g. the user should get a validation error, if she generated more than 10 items.
Instead there should be a possibility to generate items with required fields without filling them out and they should be validated only when the whole form is submitted and not on each ajax call.
For another description / use case see #33.
Proposed resolution
Introduce a new setting for the form control '#ajax' called 'suppress_required_fields_validation', which when set to TRUE, will force the FormValidator to skip validation of required fields for the ajax call this setting was set for.
A form element might then set the ajax form control with the setting suppress_required_fields_validation like this:
'#ajax' => array(
'callback' => 'my_custom_ajax_callback',
'wrapper' => 'my_custom_wrapper_id',
'effect' => 'fade',
'suppress_required_fields_validation' => TRUE,
),
Remaining tasks
User interface changes
none
API changes
New setting 'suppress_required_fields_validation' for the form controll '#ajax'.
The patch commited with the issue shows the changes needed to achieve this.