Issue with saving

[Talen-Shei]

So what I wanted to accomplish was to build a table like so:

function buildatable(saveType)
    local temptable = {}
    local numitems = getNumItems() -- inconsequentially named function, 
    -- this refers to a function that simply outputs the number of different
    -- items in the array I am attempting to save the values of
    for item = 1, numitems, 1 do
        -- here I assign things to the temptable and iterate through with more for
        -- loops and more table declarations like temptable[item].subitems = {}
        -- Eventually this becomes a very large multi-dimensional array of data.

     end
     if saveType == "Global" then
         myGlobalVarReference.table = temptable -- this does not work
     else
         myPerCharacterVarReference.table = temptable -- this also does not work
     end
end

Then, as the above code suggests, get an entire table to inject into the saved vars table, For the life of me I cannot find a native function to do so (so far)

I have little time today but I thought of a decent idea to instead of passing the variable saveType to call this function from within a function and pass the reference to which table to inject this data into into. Is that a feasable option?
something like

function beforebuildatable(saveType)
    if saveType == nil then
        saveType = myPerCharacterVarReference.saveType
    end
    if saveType == "Global" then
       buildatable(myGlobalVarReference.table)  -- use global reference
    else
       buildatable(myPerCharacterVarReference.table)
    end
end

function buildatable (table) -- use same code as above but 
  -- instead build the table inside the referenced table instead of injecting

Will this work?

Note: I have really shorthanded all of this, but I believe that the basic concept can be easily read (correct me if I'm wrong) I do not have access to the real code at this time.