Incorporating Managed Metadata in Custom Solutions (MDV11) – my notes

SharePoint Connections 2010, Den Haag, 29 September 2010

Session: Incorporating Managed Metadata in Custom Solutions (MDV11)

Speaker: ANDREW CONNELL  ( http://www.andrewconnell.com/ )

• Main ideas covered by this session:
  • Creating & Importing Taxonomies
  • Managed metadata columns
  • Programming with the taxonomy Field
  • Overcoming Limitations of LINQ to SharePoint
• Taxonomy TERMS scope in SharePoint 2010:
• Global terms are scoped to Service app
• Local terms are scoped to site collection
• Taxonomies are multilingual
• In Managed Metadata Service Application you can import a CSV file
• You might consider having one Service Application per domain (e.g. one for Medical, one for finance, etc))
• You have the possibility to configure the submission of terms to the Service application (‘Closed’ meaning available only for Managers of this service application or ‘Open’ to everybody); nevertheless you can not make usage of a workflow for validation of submitted terms (not out of the box)
• Operations on a TERM in a TERM set:
  • Create, copy, reuse (capability of a term of being referenced in more than one term sets but managed in only one), merge, deprecate, move
  • The Folksonomy terms are stored in the Managed Metadata Service (MMS) in the System/Keywords terms set
  • Metadata Navigation functionality can be activated on every SharePoint List: go to ‘List Settings’
  • Automate tagging of content: It is possible to enforce a specific term by default on all items/documents of a storage element like a folder for example (option in the document library)
  • Creating & Importing Taxonomies
    • From CSV file
    • Does not support importing labels (synonyms)
    • Full taxonomy API provided: Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.dll
• Not all customer needs are satisfied by MMS out of the box like for example
  • Taxonomy based on external systems
  • Inclusion for synonyms and translations
  • Options on working with taxonomies from external system:
    • Use BCS
    • Build something yourself using the API
• Working with taxonomies through the API
  • Get a taxonomy session
  • Select a term store (MM)
  • Check the code for this session for a perfect example (adding and updating new terms via l’API)
• Creating Managed Metadata Columns in a SharePoint list is possible:
  • Via Browser or SharePoint Designer
  • Declaratively (Feature)
• Programmatically
• You must set the Term Store ID, the Term Set ID
• TermSet.GetTerms() returns a TermSetCollection and has a lots of overloads (LCID, taggable terms, collection size,  filter deprecated, terms, etc)
• Tooling: Metalogix (specialized also in migration and considers metadatas)
• LINQ & SharePoint limitations:
  • SPMetal.exe’s generated entity model includes only SharePoint Foundation 2010 types – > it does not work with LINQ to update Taxonomy terms
  • BUT a solution would be to augment the generated model via ICustomMapping.MapTo() & ICustomMapping.MapFrom() (adds logic to map data in DB to field and vice versa)

Advertisement