Sharepoint Online (365) Programmatically working with Managed Metadata

Question

So, you want to migrate some documents that have managed metadata columns from another source into SharePoint Online.

Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy is blocked.

Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Taxonomy is 2013 only?

...and other remote ways are blocked for various reasons.

I was thinking possibly something like:

item["Country"] = "-1;#" + strCountryTag;
item["f80750f091f94eed8a5edc234d010620"] = getTermWithGuid(strCountryTag, "Country");
item.Update();

Like you would with the client object model, but this doesn't work like this. (-1 is because the taxonomy hidden list is empty so I don't need to look up WSSIDs)

Does anyone know of something that will make the code work in the example, so you can use Managed Metadata fields like you would a standard 2010 installation just with a custom bit of code?

Please presume that all the term guids are accessible at this point.

Answer 1

The Country column has to be updated in this form: <WssId>;#<Label>|<TermGuid> and the linked, hidden text field has to be updated with <Label>|<TermGuid>

<WssId> should be an index in the TaxonomyHiddenList if the term exists in that list, but passing -1 seems to work too.

This works on the SP2013 version of Office365, and on-premise SP2010 and SP2013.

This MSDN blog has more details.