Output only certain records from main mailing list based on second smaller list

I have a customer who wants to see about 30 variable proofs of his mailing piece.

I receive two list each month. The main mailing list that contains about 5,000 to 10,000 records with all the address information along with a ID number, and a second list of about 30 records that contains only the cooresponding ID number of the proofs he want to see.

Normally, I use Excel to compare the two lists, and flag the ID numbers for the proof records in the main list. Then I just delete all the other records that he doesn't want to see proofs for.

I was hoping that there would be a way to just compose only the records from the main list, by doing some kind of external reference rule to look at the second smaller list... but I havn't been able to find a method or instructions that work.

Any help would be much appreciated... Thanks!

You can open up the second file with ExternalDataEx in OnJobStart, something like this:

var externalData = new ExternalDataEx("filename.txt", "\t"); // tab delimiter

Then you can do something like this in OnRecordStart:

FusionPro.Composition.composeThisRecord = externalData.FindRecord("ID", Field("ID")) > 0;