If you are using the Managed Metadata Service and developing a custom web part, you may be interested in using that nice term picker that you see when you create a new list item that contains a Managed Metadata Column.
First, let's cover the bare minimum code you'll need to get the term picker to show up in your web part. First you'll want to add a reference to Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy to your project. Then you'll need a Register directive in your ascx, like this:
<%@ Register Tagprefix="Taxonomy" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
Now you can add the picker to your web part just like any other control.
You'll notice that I didn't set any properties on the TaxonomyWebTaggingControl. Well there are three properties you'll need to set, but we'll do it programatically. Those properties are:
- SSPList - This property parses your string and builds a List to set the SspId property
- GroupId - A Guid
- TermSetList - This property parses your string and builds a List to set the TermSetId property
Now, you can set these properties declaratively if you wish, but it won't be a very portable web part, as the Guids aren't part of the import CSV format for the Managed Metadata Service, nor do any of the Taxonomy Create methods allow setting of Ids. Because of this, it's best to have your web part set these properties on the TaxonomyWebTaggingControl programatically. If you just want to see how you would go about setting these properties declaratively, scroll to the bottom of this post, as I've included it for reference.
In order to make your web part portable, you're going to need to query the Managed Metadata Service and get these values yourself. Moreover, you're going to have to do it on every load of your web part since these properties are not stored anywhere between page loads.
Note:
If you only set these properties on page load, this will work as long as there are no scenarios where you need to redraw the control again, such as having a custom server validator. In that instance, your picker would work before the postback, but the look-ahead feature would be broken after the postback.
In order to make loading our properties a little easier, here is an extension method for TaxonomyWebTaggingControl that allows you to quickly set the properties. The path part of this was
inspired by PHolpar. Also, remember that extension methods must be defined in static classes.
public static bool Configure(this TaxonomyWebTaggingControl twtc, string termSetPath)
{
bool configured = false;
TaxonomySession session = new TaxonomySession(SPContext.Current.Site);
string[] parts = termSetPath.Split(new char[] { '/' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
if (parts.Length > 0)
{
TermStore termStore = GetTermStore(session, parts[0]);
if (termStore != null && parts.Length > 1)
{
twtc.SSPList = termStore.Id.ToString();
Group group = GetGroup(termStore, parts[1]);
if (group != null && parts.Length > 2)
{
twtc.GroupId = group.Id;
TermSet termSet = GetTermSet(group, parts[2]);
if (termSet != null)
{
twtc.TermSetList = termSet.Id.ToString();
configured = true;
}
}
}
}
return configured;
}
In order to load MyTermSet, which lives within MyGroup, which resides within MyTermStore, you will use this extension method similar to the following:
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
bool configured = twtcSpecialty.Configure("MyTermStore/MyGroup/MyTermSet");
if (!configured)
{
throw new ApplicationException("Unable to find target TermSet");
}
}
The result looks just like the picker from other parts of SharePoint, with functioning look-ahead.
As promised, here is the markup if you want to configure your TaxonomyWebTaggingControl declaratively.
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