approveWork

Description

The approveWork command approves assignments Workers have submitted to Amazon Mechanical Turk. To specify the assignments to approve you can:

• Obtain the assignment IDs from a call to getResults then call the approveWork command and use the assignment argument to list the IDs. When you use this argument, you are prompted to provide optional comments that the Worker can see in the Status section of the web site.

• Use the file that a call the getResults returns as the approvefile argument. You can provide optional comments for Workers in this file. For information about the format of this file, see Files Used by the Command Line Tools.

• Provide a path to the .success file that a call to loadHITs returns. The approveWork command attempts to approve all assignments for all HITs in the .success file.

When you use this command, it initiates two payments from your Requester account. Amazon Mechanical Turk pays the reward specified in the HIT to the Worker who submitted the assignment, and also debits your account for any fees. If your Requester account does not have adequate funds for these payments, this command returns an error.

Arguments

The following table describes the arguments for the approveWork command.

Name	Description	Required
-approvefile [filename]	The name of a text file that contains a list of assignment IDs and, optionally, approval comments. For information about this file, see The approve file in Files Used by the Command Line Tools. Condition: Required if neither the -assignment argument nor the -successfile argument is specified. Example: -approvefile helloworld_approve.txt	Conditional
-assignment [assignment ID]	The assignment to approve. Multiple assignments IDs are comma separated. Condition: Required if neither the -approvefile argument nor the -successfile argument is specified. Example: -assignment SYSZH6HTMKFG2ZDECWS0	Conditional
-force	Specifies not to prompt for manual confirmation before performing the operation. Only advanced developers should use this argument. Example: -force	No
-help or -h	Displays the help for this operation. Example: -help	No
-sandbox	Runs this command in the Amazon Mechanical Turk sandbox for testing. This argument takes precedence even if you specify the production web site in your mturk.properties file. Example:-sandbox	No
-successfile [path]	The path to the .success file that a call to loadHITs returned. This argument attempts to approve all assignments for all HITs in the file. For information about this file, see The success file in Files Used by the Command Line Tools. Condition: Required if neither the -approvefile argument nor the -assignment argument is specified. Example: -approvefile helloworld_approve.txt	Conditional

Example

The following examples for Unix and Windows show how to use the approveWork command. The examples approve one assignment in the file approval.txt.

Unix

The following example demonstrates how to call this command from Unix.

./approveWork.sh -approvefile approval.txt
		

Windows

The following example demonstrates how to call this command from Microsoft Windows.

approveWork -approvefile approval.txt
		

Output

These examples produce the following output.

--- Starting approval ---
[62145TS44X94HHYGW0PZK2CP0E1K9T1PR8Z42WEZ] Assignment successfully approved 
for HIT 62145TS44X94HHYGW0PZ
--- Finished approval ---
  1 assignments approved.
  0 assignments failed to be approved.
	 

Related Commands

• rejectWork