Active Or Normal Chtml Controls

I have a category table with fields id and name. I want to display radiobutton list displaying category name.

Now I don’t know if I should use radiobuttonlist or activeradiobuttonlist. I tried to search a lot but could not find any different between normal and active controls…

A post said that we should use normal controls while using CForm and then again i got confused what all different types of form classes are there ?

Can anyone share some info or explain ?

Active controls should be used if you’re populating the attributes of a model. If you have a model instance, then you should probably be using the active functions. If the fields aren’t related to a model, use the non-active versions.