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Writing Calculated Values into a TV from Another Table

If you need to sort by a calculated value later, returning it in a snippet is not enough — you need a persistence step.

The donor case calculated a rating from another table and then asked the right follow-up question: how do you store that result in a TV so it can be sorted and seen in the manager?

Why the Snippet Alone Is Not Enough

A snippet can return the live value, but sorting and manager-side visibility usually require the value to be persisted in a TV or another indexed storage layer.

Typical Pattern

$id = $modx->documentObject['id'];
$result = $modx->db->query("SELECT total_votes, total_value FROM prefix_ratings WHERE id=$id");
$row = $modx->db->getRow($result);
$total = @number_format($row['total_value'] / $row['total_votes'], 1);
return $total;

Next Step

Once the value is calculated correctly, add a write-back step that updates the TV value during save, refresh, or a controlled maintenance pass. That turns a display-only calculation into sortable catalog data.

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