In one of my previous posts I have described how to customize toolbar buttons in SharePoint forms and how to add Approve and Reject buttons to the bottom of Workflow tasks in particular. Geir Mathisen commented on this post that it would be nice if Approve and Reject buttons could be used for changing approval status in the lists and libraries with content approval enabled. In this article I would like to cover this case.
First, we have to enable content approval feature which allows to make items or documents visible only to submitters and users with special permission (Approve/reject items) unless they are approved by these users. Go to the list settings and choose Version Settings section. Here, we should set 'Require content approval for submitted items' option to 'Yes'.
Now that we enabled content approval feature in our list, new columns - Approver Comments and Approval Status were added automatically but they do not appear in the list of fields in settings and in Forms Designer. We will add them to forms with help of HTML-control. Open Forms Designer, choose Edit form and place HTML-control with the following content: