TVs editable in front-end

I’m surely missing something simple and obviuos but I really can’t understand how to use TVs.
First of all, I’m writing a sort of PHP admin in Ajax style. Everything works but I was wondering if I can use TVs to simplify my work. Example: let’s suppose I have two tables: employee (id, name, work_id) and works(id, name).
I want to create an interface accessible by web-users which permits some sort of editing.
I.e.. when a web-user edits an employee, is it possible to create a TV associated with its word_id field, which display available works (like a dropdown list i.e.) taken from my db table ?

I’ve tried creating a TV ’works’ as explained in the tutorial (@select and dropdown list)
I’ve create a new document with:
[[works]]

If I open the page (in the front-end...) I obtain all available works separated by ||. No dropdown list. No interactivty.
I think I’m missing something.
Thank you
Matteo

OK, next time I’ll be clearer

TVs are denoted using the [*works*] tags. [[works]] would indicate it is a snippet, and probably the reason for getting the wrong output. Also if you want to edit a TV from the frontend, just do this [*#works*].