I have a certain amount of data stored in a transient through a custom developed plugin ( just for this one website ). The transient contains one big array of data that I get from an external API. The API response was really slow and I needed pretty large amounts of data, that's why I went with transients.
On the site I have made functionality that breaks the array up in smaller pieces to display all the data my users need to see on the appropriate pages.
I would like to make this searchable through a widget, just like the default WP search widget. I think i know how I can accomplish this, i've made custom widgets before. However, I would like to know if:
A. This is a good idea in general? I'm quite new to transients.
B. Is there a better ( already existing ) way to accomplish this? I've searched for already existing plugins but i could not find one that had what I needed ( which led me to think that it might not be a good idea at all ).
Again, I have absolutely no problem with building my own widget plugin for this site. However, I thought it would be a good idea to check this before I set about to reinvent the wheel.