Catalogue rating within custom templates

I have a custom display of catalogue entries within a Comcode page that use a custom set of templates (via the cc_embed block). I'm trying to display a rating block as well as details on the current rating of the entry but I'm running into some snags (again, this is a custom display of entries and is not being view from within the catalogues module).

I added the rating block into the template, like so:

Rating

Unrated

This allowed me to rate the entry but it was not saved when I refreshed the page. So I gave the block a name (it names itself with the title of the catalogue entry, which is also the name of the current page being viewed), which seems to keep the rating:

Rating

Unrated

A {RATING} param is passed into the templates but seems to always remain empty. Oddly though, it returns blank but not empty when I do something like this:

I was hoping to use this parameter to display the entry's overall rating (if that's even what it's intended for). Since I couldn't get it to show any value, I looked into using {$RATING}, like so:

This always returns 0. I assume the rating block is not communicating with the entry's actual rating, or maybe I'm using the wrong parameters within {$RATING}.

Also, are there any parameters I can pass into {$BLOCK} to hide the outer box styling of the main_rating block, and only show the star display + number of votes?

Fixes in:
https://github.com/ocproducts/composr/commit/36efb46970672a19470c20f65fe2b02fdb6d3138

Ignore the string_scan.php file.

I think your 'not saving' issue is due to your page names being something non-ID-like (e.g. some slightly unusual character), which the block didn't expect.

I've added a display_tpl block parameter which you can set to RATING_INLINE_DYNAMIC.

I think your catalogue is showing no rating because it doesn't have ratings enabled on the entry(ies).
And IF_NON_EMPTY will not consider something with just whitespace as empty. For that you need to do IF_NON_EMPTY,{$TRIM,...}. I think in the case of ratings the templating controls the various situations where rating is available or not, and templates will often introduce white-space.