Database

Cross posted from the usability forum for maximum exposure

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Currently the export form for the database module is rather confusing, and with the portfolio support in Moodle 2.0, it becomes more so.

There needs to be a way to ask the user to select both an export format, and a portfolio instance. There are two problems:



1. The export format is dependent on the portfolio (and the other way around too) - whichever you select first restricts the availability of the second. For example if you choose Leap2a portfolio format - you can't export to flickr, and similarly if you choose the portfolio first, if you choose flickr, you can't select Leap2a format. We normally get around this by putting these controls in a wizard with different screens.

2. The current form has a selection to choose which fields from the data module you wish to export, and while this works at the moment, it is inappropriate for Leap2a, which is what I'm looking at adding. (For example for CSV you can't export image fields, but you can in Leap2A)

The best solution I can see, is to convert this tab into the start of the portfolio wizard, and go through the following steps:

- Select the format you want to export
- Select the portfolio plugin, and if necessary, ask which fields the user wants to export.


This retains BC, because there is a 'file download' portfolio plugin, which means the user can download their CSV file as normal, it just goes through the portfolio API, where before it didn't.

However, this has the downside of making the file download portfolio plugin available for everyone, which may not be wanted at all. Also it means that the administrator must enable portfolios, and enable that plugin.

Can anyone see an elegant way to solve this? If we can come up with a clever screen design to include both the normal export to file (no portfolio API) *and* the export to portfolio, where the formats are the same, but the above problems are solved, then I think that is preferable to forcing the data module export to go through the Portfolio API which may or may not be on.