Knockout validation

Have a look at Knockout-Validation which cleanly setups and uses what’s described in the knockout documentation. Under: Live Example 1: Forcing input to be numeric

You can see it live in Fiddle

UPDATE: the fiddle has been updated to use the latest KO 2.0.3 and ko.validation 1.0.2 using the cloudfare CDN urls

To setup ko.validation:

ko.validation.rules.pattern.message="Invalid.";

ko.validation.configure({
    registerExtenders: true,
    messagesOnModified: true,
    insertMessages: true,
    parseInputAttributes: true,
    messageTemplate: null
});

To setup validation rules, use extenders. For instance:

var viewModel = {
    firstName: ko.observable().extend({ minLength: 2, maxLength: 10 }),
    lastName: ko.observable().extend({ required: true }),
    emailAddress: ko.observable().extend({  // custom message
        required: { message: 'Please supply your email address.' }
    })
};

If you don’t want to use the KnockoutValidation library you can write your own. Here’s an example for a Mandatory field.

Add a javascript class with all you KO extensions or extenders, and add the following:

ko.extenders.required = function (target, overrideMessage) {
    //add some sub-observables to our observable
    target.hasError = ko.observable();
    target.validationMessage = ko.observable();

    //define a function to do validation
    function validate(newValue) {
    target.hasError(newValue ? false : true);
    target.validationMessage(newValue ? "" : overrideMessage || "This field is required");
    }

    //initial validation
    validate(target());

    //validate whenever the value changes
    target.subscribe(validate);

    //return the original observable
    return target;
};

Then in your viewModel extend you observable by:

self.dateOfPayment: ko.observable().extend({ required: "" }),

There are a number of examples online for this style of validation.