Magento 2.2 added concept of ViewModel, offloading features from Block classes into separate ViewModel. Using it is quite simple. This might look like that :
<block class="Vendor\Module\Block\Example" name="example">
<arguments>
<argument name="view_model" xsi:type="object">Vendor\Module\ViewModel\Example</argument>
</arguments>
</block>New created class could be used as follows :
namespace Vendor\Module\ViewModel;
class Example implements \Magento\Framework\View\Element\Block\ArgumentInterface
{
public function __construct()
{
}
public function getItems()
{
// load here some data from db for example
}
}Finally, you can insert the new ViewModel class in your existing PHTML templates as follows :
/** @var \Vendor\Module\ViewModel\Example **/
$viewModel = $block->getViewModel();
$items = $viewModel->getItems();