Way of changing the assets from Draft to approved?

One of the users ran a Java program to modify around 700 assets. He applied a category to assets that were tagged with a certain value and had a certain other category. The program ran properly and every asset got the appropriate category. But all of the assets that he ran against, their state changed from approved to Draft. We are not able to find a way to change their state using iRAM Web client's batch operations and using Java API it seems that it would be quite complex to do. Can you please let us know if now there is any simple way to change the state of those assets back to approved?

Thanks in advance.......Payal