Use field name variable in JQuery validation rules

Question

I am a jquery newbie. I could get the validation rules working in my form. I am using a Java framework and for some reason, when it converts from .xhtml to .html, all the ui component's id/name were prefixed with the form that containing it. I would like to reuse these validation rules for two other forms but because of the prefix issue, I would need to use js variable and pass the formId to the function. For some reason, this gives me a problem:

---

NOT WORKING

var positionTitle = "#myForm:positionTitle";

$("#" + formId).validate({

  rules:{
        positionTitle : {required:true, maxlength:50},
            ...

---

WORKING

$("#" + formId).validate({

  rules:{
         "#myForm:positionTitle" : {required:true, maxlength:50},
              ...

Answer 1

After you call .validate() on the form, you an do this:

$("[name='" + positionTitle + "']").rules("add", {required:true, maxlength:50});

...but you can't use the variable as a name in an object literal like that.

The other option is constructing the rules object before it gets passed into validate(), but that gets a bit messy as well, I can't say which is better based on the question, but if you have many of these, you may want to go the rules building route.