drupal_render() and formBuilder's getForm

Question

What exactly is the best way to accomplish this? I can pass the $form object returned from getForm to drupal_render() and get the correct themed output fragment but the API docs say this function will be deprecated in D9 and to use the renderer service instead.

When I use:

\Drupal::service('renderer')->render($form)

I get

You have requested a non-existent service "renderer". Did you mean one of these: "render_html_renderer", "html_fragment_renderer", "html_page_renderer"?

When I use:

\Drupal::service('render_html_renderer')->render($form)

I get a valid object with a protected content() method, which contains the string, but I can't seem to find any valid public functions to access this.

I can normally use the route builder to point to a form controller that I've created but, in this instance, I just want to pull an existing form, get the HTML content, and display it - hopefully as a variable in a preprocess function. I don't necessarily want to create a block, since I probably won't be reusing it.

What is the best way to do this? Keep using drupal_render() until D9? Can somebody point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

There are almost no reasons to manually call drupal_render(), you can use/return render arrays almost anywhere, controllers, blocks and also in twig templates.

If you do $variables['form'] = $your_form;in preprocess, then {{ form }} in your template should just work.

Answer 2

I think should work if you do something like

$form = \Drupal::service('render_html_renderer')->render($form);
print $form->__toString();

Answer 3

Try using renderRoot() instead of render(), e.g.

\Drupal::service('renderer')->renderRoot($form)

Renders final HTML given a structured array tree.