If there are situations where you don’t actually want a validation message to visually appear for each field (i.e. by using Html.ValidationMessage),but would rather allow a summary to be the sole source of validation error messages (i.e. by using Html.ValidationSummary),you still need some way to “trigger” the validation to occur for the specific fields you want it to. This can be achieved by using the Html.Validate/Html.ValidateFor<> methods within your view. Those helpers won’t render anything,but will simply register the specified field for client-side validation.