Is it possible to have Ditto return the value of a TV that contains a snippet?

I’ve tried to write out the long explanation of what I’m trying to do five times and it’s just too complicated, but the crux of my issue is this:

I’m using Ditto to call another page. This other page contains a template variable, and its value is supposed to be the ID number for another section of the site.

The easy answer is to hand-enter this value, but I’ve written a snippet that figures out this other ID number automatically, and it works great on the page. But when I try to put the snippet call in a TV and then display the value of the TV with Ditto, it doesn’t seem to execute the snippet. I’m guessing this has something to do with parse order. Is there a solution to this? I’m using Evo 1.0.2.

I’d be glad to clarify if I’m not giving enough details.

Thanks!

I think I may be on to a solution but can’t seem to get it working, so let me pose another question. Can I set a placeholder in my snippet, and then reference that placeholder in the Ditto call on the other page?

Placeholders are only persistent for the current request, so that would not work.

The problem is the snippet has to be smart enough to figure out what it needs to regardless of what page it is executing on, yet still know what page it is being executed for. This is really a snippet design issue.

You’re absolutely right. I was trying to approach this from the perspective of Ditto (on the main page) pulling in content from another section, and on that other section using a snippet to pull in even more content from a subsequent section. What I really need to do is rewrite my snippet to operate from the main page to supply the correct startId for the Ditto call.

I’m still trying to get the snippet I wrote to work correctly on child elements at a certain level deep in this thread: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php?topic=45482.new;topicseen#new. I’m close, but can’t wrap my brain around setting it to pull things from a predetermined number of levels. If you have any suggestions on the snippet, I’d be glad to post the final code (and possibly create a snippet with usable parameters for the depth) for others to see and use, but I’m (sadly) quite stuck.