enclosing custom form element with form tag (drupal 6.x)

Question

I've created custom form using FAPI for my site. And I place each control at specific location base on template provided by the designer. For instance -

<div id="myform">
  <span>Enter Your Name : </span> <?php print drupal_render($form['name']); ?>
  <span>Gender : </span><?php print drupal_render($form['gender_radio']); ?>
  ....
</div>
 <?php print drupal_render($form['submit']); ?>

Here's my question - How do I enclose all the elements inside form tag? Is hardcoding the form tag inside the template file right way to do in drupal? or is it better to create in hook_form? But doing so would require me to add closing form tag at the end manually. Any suggestion would be highly appreciated.
Drupal - 6.x

Answer 1

It sounds like maybe you read about building individual fields, but skipped over some basic concepts of FAPI. In short, if you call the form with drupal_get_form(), you get the form container (and many of the benefits of using FAPI, e.g. tokens, validation, etc.) automatically. To handle the markup that goes around your form elements, you can then use #prefix, #suffix, and markup elements.

You can assemble the whole form from the outside in like you're doing, but there are few cases in which that would really be worthwhile. If you really want to do that, you basically want to copy what drupal_get_form() does to get the form wrapper added in a way that will work with FAPI.