I’ve been working lately on a project that requires access to the Managed Metadata Service in SP2010. I got to a point where I needed to add a term to the default term store under a term set.
I have some code in my project that takes in the following parameters and creates a term in the term store:
- TaxonomyClientService proxy instance
- Term name
- Term store ID
- Term Set ID
I needed to use the AddTerm method of the proxy to create a new term, and spent most of my afternoon wrestling with the format of the NewTerms parameter of the method.
The following MSDN documentation is wrong! (here) – or at least not informative.
The MSDN documentation stipulates to use NewTerm nodes to wrap new terms in the XML passed to the service. What the documentation did not tell me was:
1. The term set must be open, otherwise the method returns an empty string.
2. The method need the exact syntax for the XML to work – looking on the web, I found no real answer to this problem, and ended up reflecting the web service code to get my answer. Below is a sample piece of XML.
<newTerms><newTerm label="MyTerm" clientId="1" parentTermId="GUID of parent or empty GUID if none"></newTerm></newTerms>
Worth noting with the above XML…
1. Notice the lowercase use of newTerms and newTerm (not uppercase N as in the MSDN documentation)
2. clientId does very little and so you can pass the value 1
3. The parentTermId must be a real GUID, and Guid.Empty if no parent
4. New terms wrap in the newTerms node, which MSDN failed to mention.
I hope this post saves others an afternoon worth of work, which it cost me.
6 Comments
I am trying to add terms into my Office 365 site’s term store using taxonomyclientservice.asmx from my Client ASP.NET application. I am passing authentication cookies correctly and is authorized correctly because i can access the list data . My problem is ,that its not adding terms to termstore and always AddTerms() Method returns null. Here is code I am using.
helper = new MsOnlineClaimsHelper(
“myname@XXXX.onmicrosoft.com”,
“password”,
“https://XXXX.sharepoint.com/sites/Search/”);
Taxonomywebservice txnmyWebService = new Taxonomywebservice();
CookieCollection cookieColl = helper.CookieContainer.GetCookies(new Uri(“https://XXXX.sharepoint.com/sites/Search/”));
txnmyWebService.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
txnmyWebService.CookieContainer.Add(cookieColl);
string sspIds = “cf1a07fc-9293-4903-a066-c1967afc6998″;
string termSetId = “c3945e82-4873-4429-95cf-cc9b87689455″;
string newTerms = @”
“;
// AddTerms is always returning Null. I am trying to AMERICAS just under my termset
string result = txnmyWebService.AddTerms(new Guid(sspIds), new Guid(termSetId), CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.LCID, newTerms);
Why it is always returning Null?. PLease help me….
Did you mean to pass an empty string as newTerms?
Hi Rob,
I have been facing the issue with the AddTerms method of the Taxonomy web service. I used the same structure for the term as you mentioned. But the web method returns only a string with value: ”
I have checked the term store Submission policy and it is Open. I dont know what could be the issue. :(
Please help.
Bhavna
Pasted the code for your reference:
string strSSPID = “cb1d4195-fd96-4a55-8007-324928f90676″;
string strTermSetId = “c96c4bc7-b355-43be-90ab-98b07b69d903″;
TaxonomyService.TaxonomywebserviceSoapClient ts = new TaxonomyService.TaxonomywebserviceSoapClient();
ts.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;
ts.ClientCredentials.Windows.AllowedImpersonationLevel = System.Security.Principal.TokenImpersonationLevel.Impersonation;
string newTermID = string.Empty;
string newTerm = @”
“;
newTermID = ts.AddTerms(new Guid(strSSPID), new Guid(strTermSetId), 1033, newTerm);
The new term is being truncated in the post above:
string newTerm = @”"
Thanks Rob, you are a life saver! Couldn’t work out what to put for the newTerm until I found your article.
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