jQuery Validation plugin: disable validation for specified submit buttons

You can add a CSS class of cancel to a submit button to suppress the validation

e.g

<input class="cancel" type="submit" value="Save" />

See the jQuery Validator documentation of this feature here: Skipping validation on submit

---

EDIT:

The above technique has been deprecated and replaced with the formnovalidate attribute.

<input formnovalidate="formnovalidate" type="submit" value="Save" />

Yet another (dynamic) way:

$("form").validate().settings.ignore = "*";

And to re-enable it, we just set back the default value:

$("form").validate().settings.ignore = ":hidden";

Source: https://github.com/jzaefferer/jquery-validation/issues/725#issuecomment-17601443

Other (undocumented) way to do it, is to call:

$("form").validate().cancelSubmit = true;

on the click event of the button (for example).