Tape Management - what to remove from library and what to put back.

Hello I am trying to setup a script to help out with tape management but I am having some issues and would like to see if I could get some help. My script runs weekly and does a few different things

1. finds my clones to go offsite,updates the location and ejects them. (they are removed from cap)

2. send an email to offsite company list of what tapes they are to pick up and which ones to return.

3. it then ID's tapes with more than 3 month retention that have been full for over 90 days,updates the location and puts them in the cap to be removed and placed in a rack

4. it then finds tapes in the rack or offsite that expire within x number of days to be put back into the library to be used again once they expire.

My issue is that I haven't found a way to list the volumes by the expiration date so that if I need 12 tapes to go into library but I have 30 that meet the criteria, I get the 12 that are expired and or expire soonest and not just any 12 out of the 30.

My best thought is to run the 30 into a file then create a script that would sort them then spit out the volumes by expiration, just seems like mminfo should be able to do it but I am not getting it to work.

Am I missing something? oh also if someone has a simple way to verify the cap is empty when the script starts, I have found a couple idea but way to complex for what it is doing.

OS Windows 2003 Stnd

Networker 7.6.1