Create a new course with just one section, create a new database module with comments enabled. Create a couple of database records (database entries) As a student and admin, comment only in one of the database records Enable "Mobile services": Plugins ► Web Services ► Mobile Create a Token for the user (student) your are going to test with: Click on Site administration ► Plugins ► Web services ► Manage tokens Click add, select user and service (Mobile Service) Next, you can do a CURL REST call simulating a WS client: You need to replace the wstoken and the URL of your moodle instance. And the following parameters: instanceid with the course module id and itemid with the database entry record id you commented in, the id from the data_records table curl 'http://localhost/m/stable_master/webservice/rest/server.php?moodlewsrestformat=json' -H 'Pragma: no-cache' -H 'Origin: file://' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: es,en;q=0.8,de-DE;q=0.6,de;q=0.4,nb;q=0.2' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1798.0 Safari/537.36' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8' -H 'Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01' -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --data 'contextlevel=module&instanceid=84&component=mod_data&itemid=1&area=database_entry&page=0&wsfunction=core_comment_get_comments&wstoken=a70d553bbaf6d9b260a9e5c701b3c46e' --compressed Confirm that: You receive a list including all the comments in the database record entry If you try to retrieve comments from a different entry (empty) you will receive just empty arrays You can use jsonlint.com for formatting the output