Approvals

Use approvals to hold Form Builder submissions for staff review before the submitted changes are written to iMIS.

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Note

Approvals require a Forms - Premium license.

How approvals work

Form Builder normally writes submitted form data directly to the iMIS database. When a form or form group requires approval, submitted changes are held in the approvals queue until staff review them.

The approval process follows this flow:

1. A form or form group is marked Requires Approval.
2. A user submits the form.
3. The submitted changes are held instead of immediately written to iMIS.
4. Staff review the submission in the Approvals queue.
5. Staff approve, reject, return, or partially approve the submitted changes.

Supported form elements

The following Form Builder elements are supported with approvals:

• Text and graphics
• Contact fields
• Address fields
• Activity fields
• Single instance
• Multi-instance

The following elements are not supported with approvals:

• Multi-layout
• Documents and file upload fields
• Signup fields

File uploads and multi-instance layouts are not supported because they update iMIS directly and cannot be intercepted before database commitment. Signup fields are not supported for approval-based account creation because iMIS must already know the assigned iMIS ID.

Require approval for a form

Do the following to require approval for an individual form:

1. Go to RiSE > Form Builder > Form library.
2. Edit the form.
3. Select Requires approval.
4. Click Update.

Require approval for a form group

Do the following to require approval for every form in a form group:

1. Go to RiSE > Form Builder > Form groups.
2. Edit the form group.
3. Enable Requires Approval.
4. Save the form group.

When approval is enabled at the form group level, forms in that group show Requires Approval as locked.

Review submitted forms

Staff review pending submissions from RiSE > Form Builder > Approvals queue.

The approvals queue shows:

• Submissions waiting in the queue
• Approvals completed this month
• Post errors pending
• Filters by status, form, group, submission ID, and submitted date

When reviewing a submission, staff can view:

• Update of information about the person being updated
• Submitted by information when someone submitted on another user’s behalf
• Process History for processing and error records
• Staff Notes for internal comments
• Approval Matrix showing changed and unchanged fields
• Approval Controls for rejecting, returning to queue, or approving

Approve or reject changes

From the submission review page, staff can approve the full submission, reject it, return it to the queue, or approve only selected updates.

If staff approve a submission but leave some updates unselected, the unselected updates are rejected and are not written to the database.

Customize submitter and party information

The displayed submitter and party information can be customized by updating the following IQAs:

• PartyInformation
• SubmitterInformation

These queries are located in $/Forms/Approvals. By default, they show contact name, ID, member type, category, email, and company.

Processing behavior

Approval processing mirrors normal form submission processing. Updates are applied in order, the Change Log is updated according to Panel Designer settings, and post-processing runs if applicable.

After the submission is successfully processed, its status becomes Completed and no further approval actions are available.

Post errors

Post errors can occur if:

• A database field no longer exists.
• A field type or attribute changed.
• Business logic in post-processing fails.
• A technical or programming error occurs.

If a post error occurs, the submission is marked as Post Error and details are recorded in Process History. Staff must resolve the issue directly in iMIS. The form submission cannot be resubmitted after a post error.

Alternative review process

Instead of using approvals, organizations can use status codes such as Unreviewed. This allows data to be captured immediately in iMIS and reviewed later through queries.