How to show setCustomValidity message/tooltip with

Question

I'm using forms basic validation to check if email is correct format, then the data is sent by Ajax where it checks if email address is already in use and did the user select country/state or left default values in select boxes.

But for HTML5 form validation to be done submit event is needed, upon clicking submit if it passes that basic form validation Ajax operation is performed, but then when results come in I would like to use the same browser tooltips for interface consistency (and well I like how they look).

So is there a way to make them show up, I was unable to find if there is some special event for them or something like firing submit event but stopping it right away. Right now the field only gets a red edge and error message appears on hovering mouse over it, while the tooltip shows on again clicking submit button.

Also for browsers that don't have native tooltips(in my case Safari) I'm using Webshims Lib and it acts exactly the same as in Chrome and Firefox.

Answer 1

A polyfill for HTMLFormElement.reportValidity().
Tested with IE11 and Edge. But when running in the StackOverflow sandbox below with IE11, the validation messages are not displayed.

function reportValidityPolyfill() {
  const button = createInvisibleSubmitButton();
  this.appendChild(button);
  this.addEventListener("submit", submitEventHandler);
  var isValid = false;
  button.click();
  this.removeEventListener("submit", submitEventHandler);
  this.removeChild(button);
  return isValid;

  function createInvisibleSubmitButton() {
    const button = document.createElement("button");
    button.type = "submit";
    button.style.display = "none";
    return button;
  }

  function submitEventHandler(event) {
    event.preventDefault();
    isValid = true;
  }
}

if (!HTMLFormElement.prototype.reportValidity) {
  HTMLFormElement.prototype.reportValidity = reportValidityPolyfill;
  console.log("ReportValidity polyfill installed.");
} else {
  console.log("ReportValidity polyfill skipped.");
}

input {
  outline: 1px solid #0f0;
}

input:invalid {
  outline: 1px solid #f00;
}

<form id="form1">
  Enter a number from 1 to 5: <input type="number" min="1" max="5" required>
</form>
<br>
<div onclick="console.log('Validity: ' + document.getElementById('form1').reportValidity())">
  Click here to call reportValidity()
</div>

Answer 2

It's actually very simple - add a hidden input element to your form:

<input type="hidden" id="myFormCheck" required="true" value=""/>

Call myInputField.setCustomValidity(message) on the input element you want to create a custom tooltip on then call your form.click();

The form validity process runs and displays the message popup over that element, but the form won't submit because of the hidden element, so you won't need to catch and cancel the submit event.

When you're done and really ready to go, set a value on the hidden element and the form will submit normally.

This way you can use the form tooltip for something like checking for usernames that are available, or matching any value over an HTTP Request etc.