Working with Taxonomy and JavaScript in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 has introduced some nice new features, one of which is the ability to manipulate managed metadata with the JavaScript Object Model. Unlike SharePoint 2010, we can now do a variety of operations with the Taxonomy Items in SharePoint 2013. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, there is not a lot of documentation available on MSDN with regards to this particular feature.There is some preliminary documentation available for the Taxonomy in .NET Managed Client Object Model but the JavaScript API Reference has not been updated yet. So hopefully this blog will come in handy for someone looking to explore. All right lets get started:

First and foremost, you will have to load the SP.Taxonomy.js on your page explicitly as it is not loaded by default in SharePoint. Also make sure that you have loaded the SP.Runtime.js and SP.js files before continuing with your taxonomy code. Various errors like "SP.Taxonomy is not defined" or "Unable to get property 'TaxonomySession' of undefined or null reference" might come up if you have not loaded all the 3 necessary files on your page.

A simple way to load all the 3 files is with the jQuery.getScript function:



Now lets see some actual code which you can use to Manipulate the Taxonomy Items:

1) Query a particular Term Set and get all the Terms under it:

2) Create new Term Group under the Term Store:

3) Create new Term Set under a Term Group:

4) Create new Term under a Term Set:

5) Get Value of a Single Value Taxonomy Column in a List:

6) Get Values of a Multi Value Taxonomy Column in a List:

Hopefully you found this helpful. Happy SharePointing!