API

[jkapp]

I know this horse has been beaten before but I’m going to add my voice. Please can we get a public API for LCR data. As someone who has had a lot of the same frustrations voiced here I am shocked that this doesn’t exist already.

As a high councilor and executive secretary I’ve many, many times needed access to various report data. Getting reports from the stake clerk and trying to sync changed callings from a manually generated report is simply impractical. In my stake the YW or YM presidencies would change between virtually every email I sent. As a stake council we discussed these issues regularly and wished for the tools to build what we wanted. An API for any organization the size of the church is an expected resource these days. Please, PLEASE expose one for us!

[aebrown]

First of all, this forum is for user-to-user communication. You may get a lot of sympathy here, but no one here can make the decision you're asking for.

It's been made quite clear that the policy of the Church at the present time is that only official applications such as LDS Tools and Leader and Clerk Resources have access to the membership data.

If you want to request a change in this policy, you have two options:

• Send feedback using the link on LCR.
• Convince your stake president to pass the request to his area seventy and up the chain.

[russellhltn]

And just for background, there have been export functions in the past. But many have been removed. Sometimes we're told it's for data privacy, and other times we're not told why. But the trend doesn't look good.

Lastly, remember, the folks who make the decision can probably remember back before the internet. They even remember back before wards had computers. And yet, the church functioned. I doubt if they'd view the situation as dire, or even that necessary.

[sbradshaw]

What type of reports are you manually generating? The Church tries to provide useful reports directly on Leader and Clerk Resources. It might be worth making a list of what reports you're manually creating, and seeing if an LCR-provided report would be adequate. If not, you can send feedback using the link at the bottom of Leader and Clerk Resources requesting that a specific type of report be added (that might be a more likely change than a public API for membership data).

[jkapp]

Thanks for your comments. I assumed this was a forum that technical LDS employees were monitoring for feedback.

The issue isn’t really whether the built in reports contain the right information, although that’s a secondary issue. It’s really about getting the data conveniently. People will resort to scraping what they can (and I have) in the absence of an API, but it’s terribly inconvenient. Getting the right information is tricky because the needs and callings change regularly.

Back to screen scraping I guess.

[kblestarge]

As an Elders Quorum president, I am sad there isn't an API. I would love to have more control over reports to track specific metrics and have more control over filtering and time-ranges. What's available through lcr is pretty limited.