The reporting interface (https://asa.mit.edu/groups/reporting/) allows extracting a large amount of data from the ASA Database.

You should almost always generate reports that '''include the ID field'''. If you need to do later processing, syncing, etc., it's likely that being able to match your spreadsheet with the DB using the ID field will be helpful.

== Mail Merge ==

The `adehnert` locker contains a mail-merge utility that can be used with reports. See http://web.mit.edu/adehnert/Public/software/my-snippets/mail-merge-help/ for documentation. You'll generally want to include the ID, name, and officers' email list fields in your report, and will need to rename the officers' email list column to "email" to do the merge.

== Generate group lists for forms ==

Forms such as the midway application form (http://asa.scripts.mit.edu/applications/midway/midway.php) need to be regularly updated with a current list of groups. To find the group list that's being used, look in the form source for a line like "`include '../include/group_list_midway.php';`". That indicates that the group list lives in `/mit/asa/web_scripts/applications/include/group_list_midway.php`.

Using the reporting interface, select the groups that you want and include "<option> entry" under "Special fields". If you need to filter the list in ways that the reporting interface doesn't support, you can open the output file in Excel or a similar tool and do further filtering there. Then, copy and paste the "<option> entry" field into the group list file that the form uses. (You should likely include a header like "`<!-- Generated from the reporting interface. See https://asa.scripts.mit.edu/trac/wiki/ReportingInterface. -->`" to encourage future updaters to use the semi-automated generation method.)

=== Other approaches ===

Before using the reporting interface, you might check if `/mit/asa-db/data/db-dump/` contains a file you can just copy over.