Drupal form api output as raw HTML

Question

How might I access the raw HTML generated for a form by the Drupal Form API?

Recently, I finished a long and difficult task of building custom forms in Drupal. I am very familiar and comfortable with the Drupal form API system so all the work was very strongly based on the Form API.

However, those Drupal forms I created also need to be represented in a Phonegap app.

So, I have began thinking about how to extract the form data from Drupal in order to create the same forms in Phonegap.

Then it occurred to me if I can somehow programmatically download the raw HTML the Form API generates in Drupal, I can just copy and past into Phonegap.

Is it possible to programmatically access the raw HTML data output by the Drupal Form API?

Answer 1

Try to use render() function.

So for example your function that build form called my_form(). Then you just need get this form with drupal_get_form('my_form') and render it with render() function.

function my_form_html() {
  $form = drupal_get_form('my_form');
  $html = render($form);
}