Manage approvals

This document explains how to manage approvals in the Google Drive API.

You can find your content approvals in Google Drive. The Google Drive API provides the approvals resource so you can get and list the status of your approvals. The methods of the approvals resource work on items within Drive, Google Docs, and other Google Workspace editors.

You can use this process to locate approvals in formal review situations, such as a contract review or an official document before publication. An approval tracks the status of both the review (such as In Progress, Approved, or Declined) and the reviewers involved. Approvals are an excellent way to validate content and to keep a record of reviewers.

To view approvals on a file, you must have permission to read the metadata of the file. For more information, see Roles and permissions .

Use the fields parameter

If you want to specify the fields to return in the response, you can set the fields system parameter with any method of the approvals resource. If you omit the fields parameter, the server returns a default set of fields specific to the method. To return different fields, see Return specific fields .

Get an approval

To get an approval on a file, use the get method on the approvals resource with the fileId and approvalId path parameters. If you don't know the approval ID, you can list approvals using the list method.

The response body contains an instance of the approvals resource.

List approvals

To list approvals on a file, call the list method on the approvals resource and include the fileId path parameter.

The response body consists of a list of approvals on the file. The items field includes information about each approval in the form of an approvals resource.

The approvals resource also includes a Status object that details the status of the approval, as well as the ReviewerResponse object that details the response to an approval made by a specific reviewer. This reviewer's response is represented by the Response object.

You can also pass the following query parameters to customize pagination of, or filter, the approvals:

  • pageSize : The maximum number of approvals to return per page. If you don't set pageSize , the server returns up to 100 approvals.

  • pageToken : A page token, received from a previous list call. This token is used to retrieve the subsequent page. It should be set to the value of nextPageToken from a previous response.

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