I have an activity I use in one of my courses where the students talk and share information on a topic. I have a database set up where students record their "Partner's name” (text input) followed by the"Partner's Information” (text area) and finally "Topics Discussed” (checkbox) and then other students read and comment on the information posted by their classmates. All of that information in the fields can be exported, but I would like to be able to export comments that are made to the database entries. Sometimes there is only one comment, but other times as many as five or six. Is there a way to do this?
The Database comments is not a Database field so it cannot be csv exported. Comments are also not exported via the Database portfolio export. There is the Site administration -> Reports -> Comments which shows a list of comments, but it won't be of much help because it lists the comments from the whole site without context and it doesn't have an export function. So, there's probably no way to do this.
The Dataform exports comments to csv but the whole html. It may be enhanced to export the comments in plain text but we need to discuss how to do that so that it is usable. It should also be possible to export entries to html via the Dataform portfolios export but it is currently broken. If you are interested you can open a tracker issue in the Set: Dataform tracker (https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB/component/13430) and we can take it from there.