Store SNS share value via function.php

Question

I am trying to store SNS share value + comment count on my postmeta, DB. I put code below to accomplish this task,

function get_sns_share($post_ID=0) { 
    $url1=get_permalink($post->ID);
    $src = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://graph.facebook.com/' . $url1));
    $share_count = $src->shares; // facebook commnet + comment like + share + like
    $my_var = get_comments_number( $post_id ); // comment count
    $social_score = $share_count + $my_var + $tweet; // social score sum
        if ($social_score > 999) $social_socre = 999;

    return $social_score;

update_post_meta($post_id, '_social_score', $social_score);
}

The problem is this code certainly do works every field other than update_post_meta. It seems it does not add add post meta field to my database, thus I cannot get any value from there. Your help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Within a function or method, the return statement immediately stops the execution of the earlier.
Hence the last line never gets interpreted.

Switch the order of this:

return $social_score; 
update_post_meta($post_id, '_social_score', $social_score);

to this:

update_post_meta($post_id, '_social_score', $social_score);
return $social_score;

Update:

You are using three different variables for the post id, namely: $post_ID, $post_id and $post->ID. You should use the function argument: $post_ID.