Moodle API Forums

To download databases the following functions are of interest:

Area	Name	Introduced in	Description
mod_forum	mod_forum_get_forums_by_courses	2.5 (2013051400)	Returns a list of forum instances in a provided set of courses, if no courses are provided then all the forum instances the user has access to will be returned.
mod_forum	mod_forum_get_forum_discussions_paginated	2.8 (2014111000)	Returns a list of forum discussions optionally sorted and paginated.
mod_forum	mod_forum_get_forum_discussions	3.7 (2019052000)	Returns a list of forum discussions optionally sorted and paginated.
mod_forum	mod_forum_get_forum_discussion_posts	2.7 (2014051200)	Returns a list of forum posts for a discussion.
mod_forum	mod_forum_get_discussion_posts	3.7 (2019052000)	Returns a list of forum posts for a discussion.

Forums are part of the course content.

An example module which returns core_course_get_contents:

{
    "id":944164,
    "url":"https:\/\/moodle.uni.de\/m\/mod\/forum\/view.php?id=944164",
    "name":"Ank\u00fcndigungen",
    "instance":44539,
    "visible":1,
    "uservisible":true,
    "visibleoncoursepage":1,
    "modicon":"https:\/\/moodle.uni.de\/m\/theme\/image.php\/boost_campus\/forum\/1589567880\/icon",
    "modname":"forum",
    "modplural":"Foren\/Blogs",
    "indent":0,
    "onclick":"",
    "afterlink":null,
    "customdata":"\"\"",
    "completion":0
}

The module indicates where the forum is located in the course, nothing more can be derived from it.

Load a list of all forums

mod_forum_get_forums_by_courses

Parameter
Funktion
Returns

With the help of mod_forum_get_forums_by_courses all forum-id's of all courses can be loaded. It exists since Version 2.5. The function takes the following arguments:

courseids is an array of the course-ids from which the forums are to be loaded.

mod_forum_get_forums_by_courses returns a list of forums:


{
    "id":52079,
    "course":27288,
    "type":"news",
    "name":"Ank\u00fcndigungen",
    "intro":"Nachrichten und Ank\u00fcndigungen",
    "introformat":1,
    "introfiles":[

    ],
    "duedate":0,
    "cutoffdate":0,
    "assessed":0,
    "assesstimestart":0,
    "assesstimefinish":0,
    "scale":0,
    "maxbytes":0,
    "maxattachments":1,
    "forcesubscribe":1,
    "trackingtype":1,
    "rsstype":0,
    "rssarticles":0,
    "timemodified":1586339792,
    "warnafter":0,
    "blockafter":0,
    "blockperiod":0,
    "completiondiscussions":0,
    "completionreplies":0,
    "completionposts":0,
    "cmid":1086705,
    "numdiscussions":2,
    "cancreatediscussions":false,
    "lockdiscussionafter":0,
    "istracked":true,
    "unreadpostscount":0
}

Important attributes:

course is the id of the course the forum belongs to.
id is the id of the forum
cmid is the module id that was returned by core_course_get_contents
name is the name of the forum

Load a list of all discussions of a forum

mod_forum_get_forum_discussions_paginated

Parameter
Funktion
Returns

mod_forum_get_forum_discussions (since 3.7)

Parameter
Funktion
Returns

To get a list of discussions in the forum there are two functions. mod_forum_get_forum_discussions_paginated is used from version 2.8 to 3.7 and is the deprecated version of mod_forum_get_forum_discussions. Both functions work identically. The function takes the following arguments:

forumid is the id of the forum from which the discussions should be loaded.
perpage specifies how many entries should be returned at once, this is optional.
page is the page number of the paged result.

For the new function only:

sortorder Is the way the list should be sorted, as integer. SORTORDER_LASTPOST_DESC = 1 gives the best result, because you can filter the already downloaded discussions.

For the old function only:

sortby is an entry from id, timemodified, timestart or timeend
sortdirection is an entry from ASC or DESC

Download discussion posts

mod_forum_get_forum_discussion_posts

Parameter
Funktion
Returns

mod_forum_get_discussion_posts (since 3.7)

Parameter
Funktion
Returns
Result Structure

To finally download all entries of a discussion, the function mod_forum_get_forum_discussion_posts is required. This function exists since version 2.7 but will be deprecated in 4.1. The function takes the following arguments: