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

== Using the reporting interface to 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.