Another module to consider for addressing these requirements is Forena.
You would use it's report writing features (such as its WYSIWYG report writer and/or it's query builder) to first create a report that fits your needs (e.g. to remedy your '... the information is not what we need - it only gives me usernames ...'). The result of it could be a tabular output and/or graph. After the report content matches the specifications,you could save it as (e.g.) a CSV file.
Here is a quote from one of the forena community docu pages, i.e. Reasons for considering Forena:
Reports created by Forena (combined with SVGGraph and mPDF) can be
saved (exported) as PDF documents with embedded graphs. Other
supported formats for saving a report are CSV, XLS, DOC, HTML, etc.
The Forena Video demos and tutorials contain quite some links to live demos.
Any report created with Forena can be saved (exported) in various file formats, such as CSV or XLS. To do so, just add .csv
as an extention to the report (output) URL. That contains the CSV equivalent of that report. As a sample, consider the sample report located at /reports/sample.states
(in your own site, one of the samples shipped with Forena). Change the URL to /reports/sample.states.csv
(= just add .csv
to it) to get the same report in .csv
format. If you'd add such .csv
to the URL of the Simple Table of States in the demo site, the result is like so ...
Same technique applies for other supported extensions (export formats), such as adding .html
, .xls
(MS Excell), .pdf
or .doc
(MS Word).
By the way, all data blocks are accessible directly via their url also, provided you have permission to access that block. Here are a few samples of that, for the sample report located at /reports/sample.states
:
For short, to answer this specific answer I'd write the various (custom) SQLs I need, format it as reports that fit my needs, and then just save it as an XLS (or CSV?).
Disclosure: I'm a co-maintainer of Forena.