Yes, the AP would just need to have appeared on the controller once for those commands to work.
There is no other way outside of CPSEC. The issue with managing APS with CPSEC whitelist is that is the only way you can change the name. If you try to provision the AP with a group or name, it will revert back to the CPSEC whitelist name. So if you provisioned some with the whitelist and some without, you will end up with the whitelist being enforced and the others being changed. It can get confusing.
Long story short, there is no other way to do it outside of the CPSEC whitelist if you have CPSEC on and ap-rename and ap-regroup if CPSEC is off.