Sharing data with blocks

Question

I have a page that displays some data. The source of the data is not Drupal nodes, so Views is of no use me:

function mymodule_main_page($arg1, $arg2, $arg3) {
  $results = call_remote_api_and_get_lots_of_results($arg1, $arg2, $arg3);
  return theme('mymodule_page', $results, $arg1, $arg2, $arg3);
}

My module also displays a block. The block purpose is to summarize the the results that were returned in the main page content (eg: Number of results: X, Number of pages: Y, etc)

/**
 * Implementation of hook_block().
 */
function mymodule_block($op = 'list', $delta = 0, $edit = array()) {
  switch ($op) {
    case 'view':
      if ($delta == 0) {
        $block['subject'] = t('Results summary');
        $block['content'] = theme('mymodule_results_summary');
      }
      break;
  }
}

I need to avoid generating the results again. What is the best way for my block to access the results object returned in the function that drew the main page? Global or Static vars? Is there a module that exists that already attempts to solve this problem?

Answer 1

You may store your data by drupal cache system. See cache_set and cache_get functions for more information.

Answer 2

In addition to the cache system that ya.teck mentions, a more simple way is to cache the entire block for x mins, hours, days. Drupal has a built in cache system for all blocks. You can see some of the settings at admin/settings/performance

Update:
The drupal way both core and contrib is to use a static variable an array or the actual variable and store the heavy lifting there. An example could be node_load, which stores all of the loaded nodes in an array so each node only needs to be loaded once during each request.

Answer 3

Very good and flexible solution is using drupal core functions cache_set and cache_get as ya.teck mentioned but extend its functionality with cacherouter module. You can specify cache storage engines and use memcache or shared memory for you cache. It doesn't use database for storing data and very fast.