Mod_data fields are currently shown ordered by their database ID.

However, when you backup and restore a mod_data activity, this is not deterministic - I have had reports that it inverts the field ordering on restore because of this.

This then affects the export, as the exported columns are inverted from what they were previously.

In our particular case, this activity is copied to lots of courses and having each course have a slightly different order is tedious to fix manually.

It would be a nice feature to have to be able to order these explicitly (e.g. up/down arrows), and then have them remain in the order after backup/restore, and use this order for backup/restore.

MDL-11839 somewhat added this, but only for the actual form the user fills in, not for other things like exporting the data.