Site approvals are an advanced, optional feature in mWater where you can choose to review any site additions, modifications, and deletions in belonging to sites managed by your organization. This allows you to keep track of what is changing, and communicate with users when amendments are needed.
If site approvals are enabled for your organization, all changes made to sites happen as normal but these sites get a Pending Approval status which allows them to be filtered away in visualizations, and they show up to site approval administrators. The administrators can then view these site additions, modifications or deletions on the site approvals page, and there they can approve, reject or undo the changes. If rejecting changes, the administrators can also message enumerators with reasons why the site changes are being rejected, so the user knows what should be updated before the site gets resubmitted.
Setting up Site Approvals
To enable site approvals for your organization, you need to have an organization admin switch on the option from the Organizations page.
Steps to enable site approvals:
1) Go to your Organization.
2) Go to the Settings tab of the branch you want to enable site approvals for. Typically this is the top level branch. It is also possible to enable this for sub-branches if they have also been allowed to manage sites.
3) Tick the option to Enable approving of sites.
4) Select the users or groups who can approve site changes. This can be a different set of users than the branch admins.
5) Save your changes from the bottom right.
Enable site approvals from your organization top branch Settings
Note: If you enable site approvals, site changes still happen directly as they are made.
The difference is that sites receive a Pending approval field. This gives administrators a chance to easily roll back changes.
Sites can then also be filtered in maps, dashboards, datagrids and consoles so that Pending and Approved sites are separated from each other.
These settings can be adjusted later. If set at the top branch level, these administrators will see the site approvals for all the sites Managed By that organization. If you want to manage sites in a more detailed way, get in touch at info@mwater.co.
The Site Approvals page
Once site approvals have been enabled, the administrators which have been set in the organization settings tab will be able to view site additions, changes and deletions on the site approvals page from that point onwards. Site changes made in the past will not be shown.
You can access Site Approvals from the Sites page
The list of site approvals shows the site details, who made the change and when, and whether the site was added, modified, or deleted. If the site was modified, the individual changes are highlighted in yellow. Sites that show up as pending have their Pending approval field set. This can be used in consoles, dashboards, maps, and datagrids to filter between sites that have been approved, and sites that have not been approved.
The list of approvals can be filtered by site type, date, organization, dataset, mWater ID, and whether the site is Pending or Rejected.
Administrators can Approve, Reject and Undo site changes
You can view full site details and edit them directly from the Open link under the site details on the left side of the list.
Actions you can take as a site approval administrator:
1) Approve site changes - This marks the site changes as approved.
2) Reject site changes. This allows you to send a message back to the site approver with a reason for rejecting the changes as they stand. Once the enumerator has made an update, they can resubmit the site (see the next section). You can also un-reject rejected site changes later.
Note: The changes are still present in the system unless they are Undone.
For example, if a user views a water point where the site type was changed from Surface Water to Hand dug well, and then the change was rejected, users will still see Hand dug well as the type. The enumerator who added the site will receive an alert in their app with a message you send to them.
3) Undo site changes. For modified sites, this reverts the site to what it was before the highlighted changes. Undo will remove a freshly created site, and undelete a deleted site. The enumerator will not be sent a message.
You can also Approve and Undo sites in bulk by selecting multiple rows from the checkboxes on the left side of each row, and then selecting the appropriate action from the top of the table.
Site Approvals in the App
If an administrator rejects site changes made by an enumerator, these will show up in the Tasks section of the app under Rejected Site Changes. Any messages sent will be shown here. The enumerator can then make the necessary amendments to the site, before resubmitting the site for approval.
Rejected Site Changes are shown in the app
Enumerators can resubmit sites for approval after changes
Filtering by Pending Approval
When you've enabled site approvals, you can also pick out sites in dashboards, consoles, datagrids, and maps by whether they've been flagged as pending or not.
In this example we will create a map layer that differentiates approved and pending community sites.
