General developer forum

I am reading the Blocks dev notes (1) and the code for existing blocks. I have to confess, I've never been too deep in the blocks code so far, and writing a custom block for 1.5 I found something very strange. The get_content() method is meant to be called twice: once to check that there is content to print, and a 2nd one to actually display it. Strangely, the blocklib framework currently doesn't do any caching or memoizing of the results. It is up to the block developer to do it.

This would require, however, that the instantiated blocks are kept around (cached in memory indeed) between the first invocation of get_content() and the second one... and apparently they aren't. Each block is being instantiated twice, and running all its db queries twice too

The $pageblocks global that could (should) be holding the block instances is holding something else instead... it seems that it only has block data from the DB.

I am looking deeper into it, but if anyone has been working on the blocks code and can shed some light, it'll be much appreciated. Where is Jon when we need him!?

1 - Entry for get_content() method here
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Blocks_Howto#Methods_you_can_freely_use_and_override