I’ve often wondered if the functionality of the “Enterprise Keywords” term set and its control can be recreated with a custom term set. This functionality is mainly:
- Users can enter as many terms as desired into a single control
- Terms that don’t resolve to existing terms are automatically added to the term set on submit (rather than requiring the user to explicitly create new terms)
It turns out that you can, as long as you implement a custom control to do so.
The TaxonomyWebTaggingControl has a boolean property called IsAddTerms that, when set to “true” (the default value is “false”), will attempt to add whatever is currently typed in the control to the control-bound term set.
Hey, listen! To alternatively allow a user to explicitly add a term to the term set, set the “AllowFillIn” property of the control to “true”
This, combined with setting the IsMulti property to true and binding the control to a custom term set, could theoretically reproduce the functionality of the “Enterprise Keywords” term set in a more tightly-governed manner that does not require all terms to be visible throughout the term store, and can add terms automatically to a custom term set.
