Building forms programmatically on the front-end

Question

I am tasked with creating a couple of new forms on the front-end, and had the idea to use Varien_Data_Form instead of hard-coding them.

Many of the forms in Magento Admin are built using the Varien_Data_Form class, as shown in this tutorial: http://astrio.net/blog/magento-admin-form/

I had a hard time finding any examples of this being used on the front-end, which made me think there might be a reason why.

Does anyone have any experience (or better, examples) of using Varien_Data_Forms on Magento's front-end?

Answer 1

My recommendation is to stay away from Varien_Data_Form for anything other than adminhtml development (in which case, you're pretty much forced to use it). It takes the simple task of creating a form and abstracts it away into an abyss of PHP/Magento nonsense.

Keep it simple. Create a form. If you want to make it dynamic, output the fields dynamically (or render them dynamically on the client side with a JS templating engine).