Email of Managed Metadata term shows horrible number in SPD

Question

If you want to display the value of a Managed Metadata column in a SharePoint Designer workflow, you get a horrible representation of it like ‘TermText|ba7e2a4f-6602-47a8-aa81-bca54756a356′.

I'm emailing out the tag using [%Current Item:MyTag]. is there a way I can remove the trailing hex digits ?

I've looked at the 'Utility Actions' but doesnt seem to be possible, can i write my own string manipulation ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Marc D Anderson explains this on his blog:
Displaying Managed Metadata Column Values in an Email Sent from a SharePoint Designer Workflow

Extract from blog:

Managed Metadata columns are so cool and so nasty at the same time. If you want to display the value of a Managed Metadata column in a SharePoint Designer workflow, you get a horrible representation of it like ‘TermText|ba7e2a4f-6602-47a8-aa81-bca54756a356′.

The only solution I know for this is the one in the comment from Kristina P on Michal Pisarek’s (@MichalPisarek) blog post Managed Metadata Column Limitations (a post which I find myself referring to far too regularly).

Here’s the meat of it:

Start with your managed metadata column (Column1Name)

Create a 2nd column (Column2Name) in the list of type string

Create a workflow that fires on create and/or on modify (depending on your needs) that copies the value from Column1Name into Column2Name.

Create a 3rd calculated column (Column3Name) on the list. The formula for that column should be =LEFT([Column2Name],FIND(“|”,[Column2Name])-1) The calculation finds the pipe character and trims the value to a clean text value.

Any emails where you need to display the value of Column1Name should use the value of Column3Name instead to send the plain text