I have seen questions about how to get the form tag in a view for the form that is being used as an alternative to rendering the whole form.

I had a project a while back that I did not want to render the form but wanted to just render each element individually so that the designer could manage the CSS and general structure of the HTML. This was not a real problem in that it is rather easy to render each element on its own using

<?php echo $this->form->elementName->render(); ?> 

for each of the elements. With ZF1, doing the view this way tends to lead to people entering the opening and closing form tags manually like so

<form action="/controllerName/actionName" method="post">
    <?php echo $this->form->elementName->render(); ?>
</form>

which means they lose out on the OOP factor of that part of Zend_Form.

My solution to this was to write a class that I could extend which provides a couple of methods to render the opening and closing form tags.

<?php

class App_Form extends Zend_Form
{
    public function getFormOpenTag()
    {
        $html = "<form ";
        foreach ($this->getAttribs() as $key => $value) {
            $html .= $key . '="' . $value . '" ';
        }
        return $html . '>';
    }

    public function getFormCloseTag()
    {
        return "</form>";
    }

}

You will note that I do not include the closing “?>” tag as this is a file that contains nothing but php code. Also, the getFormCloseTag() method seems a bit like overkill because it would take much less to simply code in the closing tag. However, when working with an IDE this might trigger a warning about having a closing tag with no matching opening tag, so it is cleaner to use both methods like so:

<?php echo $this->form->getFormOpenTag(); ?>
    <?php echo $this->form->elementName->render(); ?>
<?php echo $this->form->getFormCloseTag(); ?>

You no longer have to deal with the attributes of the form tag in the view as this will render the form tag with the attributes defined as the form object was built and all you need to do is to have your form class extend App_Form() rather than Zend_Form().