ValidateThis and CKEditor

I'm just working on a site that uses the CKEditor WYSIWYG editor and ValidateThis and wanted to make the content required. In the past I've done something like I showed in my post Validate CKEditor content length. The problem is that the client side validation that ValidateThis creates, validates against the hidden formfield that CKEditor uses and not the actual contents of the editor. I considered several possible options, including writing a custom client side validation for ValidateThis, however, in the end I went for this simple solution:

$('form').bind('submit', function(){
  if (typeof CKEDITOR != "undefined"){
    for (instance in CKEDITOR.instances){
      CKEDITOR.instances[instance].updateElement();
    }
  }
});

• Posted in:
• ValidateThis

2 comments

1. John, I was curious if you had tackled the issue of having the validation message disappear if the user enters some text into the CKEditor, ie normal input/textarea behavior.
   
   Comment by Jim Priest – October 31, 2011
2. Hi Jim, I know that CKEditor has DOM events which you could potentially use, but I'm haven't tried. Sorry! docs.cksource.com/ckeditor_api/symbols/CKEDITOR.dom.event.html
   
   Comment by John Whish – November 01, 2011