I've asked about this in the support area -- it's not an officially supported feature, so any attention from devs would have to be on an ad hoc basis, depending on availability, and there are no guarantees. Fingers crossed, but I'll have to pursue this without official support for the moment at least.

There really seems to be a lot going on behind the scenes when a form is submitted -- I'm not sure what the feasibility is of finding a solution, though I'd still love to.

If the requirement cannot be addressed by cancelling the submit event, and we can't locate a flag, attribute or method built into WFB that will help, I've got another thought - although this may have some of the same complexities. Hence, a couple of alternative approaches:

1) remove the form's submit button, add my own hand crafted button using the the HTML field option, and have the button's action = invocation of my jquery form validation; the validation routine would then submit the form itself if the form level validation were correct. The question with this this approach is this: are there important WFB event handlers tied to the "official" submit button, and would I wind up leaving them stranded by doing this, never to be executed?

2) leave the original form button -- but hide it, Add a new button, have it call the the jquery form validation, and if successful, the jquery would trigger the original button's click event.

I hate to have to come up with work arounds like this, but I need to get the form working with all the validations.

Thoughts?

Fixed!!! (do I sound happy? )

Instead of intercepting the submit event, I'm using a different approach:

Modify the form html generated by Web Form Builder:

Create a second button on the form that looks exactly like the official submit button.
Bind my jquery form validation to the click event of this new button.
If the form does not validate - display the errors in an alert and let the user fix them.
If the form DOES validate - invoke the click event of the "official" submit button.

Last step: update the "default.css":

Copy the CSS rules for the official submit button (and hover image) and update the new for the new button name.
Modify the CSS rules for the official submit button so it disappears, using "display:none" (hover image too).

It works perfectly now. This also opens the door to doing a whole host of pre-processing before the form is submitted, and then automatically submitting the form is all is copacetic.

Here's the current state of the page, using the tricks described above:
http://stronggroup.com/hlv/analysis.htm

Last piece I think this page needs is a better message box than the default jquery "alert" window. There are a number of free jquery plugins that will probably be easy to "snap in".

Happy camper here!

Cool! Glad you got it working. It doesn't matter what approach you use sometimes if it works and works reliably. I would be curious to see you final code.

Still have some fine tuning to make it "bullet proof", but I'm tweaking it gradually. I didn't like the fact that alert boxes may look totally different from one browser to the next -- not bad in Firefox, but pretty plan in Chrome (for example). I searched around, and sifted through dozens of jquery libraries and found one I liked with a nice replacement for the default alert box. You can see it in action on the form now, if you make an entry that violates the form level edits, e.g.,
- Your age is less than your anticipated retirement age
- Spouse age < = to spouse retirement age
- any kids older than you (you'd have to be 21 or 22, and the kid(s) 20 or 21.

Any combination of these will bring up the new dialog box -- check it out. I'm spoiled now -- it was an easy add-on, and I think it looks a lot more polished than the default alert (especially with the animation). While I'm cleaning up the site I'll probably update the CSS for it so it matches the rest of the site better, but I still really like it so far...