Yes, you're correct - you can get all your validation, highlighting, even focus on the first invalid field by just calling the validate()
function on a dijit.form.Form
element.
Here's an example where the validate() call is added to the onSubmit event:
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
dojo.require("dojo.parser");
dojo.require("dojo.form.Form");
dojo.require("dojo.form.ValidationTextBox");
dojo.require("dojo.form.Button");
// more includes here...
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form dojoType="dijit.form.Form" action="..." method="...">
<input dojoType="dijit.form.ValidationTextBox" trim="true" regExp="..." invalidMessage="Oops...">
<!-- // more form elemts here... -->
<button type="submit" dojoType="dijit.form.Button" ...>
Submit
</button>
<script type="dojo/method" event="onSubmit">
if (!this.validate()) {
alert("Form contains invalid data. Please correct....");
return false;
}
return true;
<script>
</form>
</body>
Hope, you find it helpful.
Cheers.
Follow-up:
Here's an example of an input field that could be used to help prompt a user as to what sort of data is expected, and would alert them when validation fails:
<input type="text" id="EXT" name="EXT" value=""
maxLength="10"
dojoType="dijit.form.ValidationTextBox"
regExp="\d+?"
trim="true"
promptMessage="<p class='help'>Please your extension. (i.e. "1234")</p>"
invalidMessage="<p class='help'>The extension field should contain only numbers.</p>">
This is a declarative example. (I misspelled it in my initial response below.)