Can I use the API to Admin Approve a draft?

Yes, and no. 

If you were to create a draft for a new within the user interface, and then click 'Admin Approve', a proposal is saved as the 'original proposal' although it will show in the workflow, 'proposal not yet submitted to workflow' and will look like this:

This will also be reflected in the Audit Log, like this:

If you were attempting to create new items to admin approve, and you wanted to use the API instead - you could do so, but it would not record the original proposal in the same way. There is an endpoint to approve a step for a proposal that is already in progress - but this won't work when you need to Admin Approve something that is not already in the workflow. 

That endpoint is designed to approve an item that is already in the workflow—it does not perform an "admin approve" action. Items that are being Admin Approved aren’t actually in the workflow yet - so if you tried to use the approve endpoint, the system would return a 400: "Item is not in workflow" error.

If your goal is to create proposals and have them automatically approved (i.e., bypass workflow), you'll want to create the item as a finalized course rather than a proposal.

This is effectively the "admin approve" flow, and it’s done by posting the full item as "new". When done this way, the item is created and considered approved without going through the standard proposal workflow. Just note that in this approach:

• The created item won’t have an associated proposal, but if you created it in the UI and admin approve then you would have the original proposal. However, doing it via API it will just show in the Audit log that you created it.
• The Audit Log will show the course as having been created directly, without workflow steps, like this:

To do this, you would send a POST request with the full course data in the body. The structure of the payload will need to match the format your curriculum management configuration expects, something like this:

If you have any additional questions or need further assistance, please reach out to our support team.