Title: Widget Validation
Last modified: August 21, 2016

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# Widget Validation

 *  [dnawp](https://wordpress.org/support/users/dnawp/)
 * (@dnawp)
 * [12 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/widget-validation/)
 * I am having some trouble figuring out what I need to do to get some validation
   code to work and return validation errors in a widget’s admin area.
 * I have made a couple of widgets extending wp_widget, all of which work fine, 
   however when I have gone to add fairly standard validation code to the widget
   I am not having much luck.
 * I put the validation code (the validation code I am talking about is no sanitisation
   but validation – ie – does a certain piece of data contain certain characters
   only or a certain number of characters) into the update method (function) and
   it works up to a point.
 * The error messages display when and if the fields have been filled in incorrectly.
   However the error message is also appearing when I first pull the widget into
   a sidebar.
 *  I am having trouble getting the widget to either not save/update immediately
   it is pulled into a sidebar area and also not run the error check or to work 
   out how to distinguish between a new widget use and an admin user has already
   tried to update. I have tried to do this with jquery but I believe that the ajax
   code wordpress is already using to deal with a save is interfering with my own
   code. At any rate I would prefer to do the checks using php.
 * Perhaps I have gone about this the wrong way and there is a more “official” way
   to handle errors specifically or otherwise in the admin settings/options for 
   a widget.
 * Any help and/or suggestions would be much appreciated.

The topic ‘Widget Validation’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [validation](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/validation/)
 * [widgets](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/widgets/)

 * 0 replies
 * 1 participant
 * Last reply from: [dnawp](https://wordpress.org/support/users/dnawp/)
 * Last activity: [12 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/widget-validation/)
 * Status: not resolved

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