Need Hierarchical Skills Results using Search Refiner WP and Term Stores

Question

Hi and thanks in advance.

I have the OOTB People > Skills term store. Users can add/edit their skills using Delve and then I want to push these skills as multi-item refiners on a people search page. This is the current hierarchy

TermStoreName
--People
  --Skills
    --SkillsGroup(a)
      --skill(a)
      --skill(b)
    --SkillGroup(b)
      --Skill(c)
      --Skill(d)

I have a search refiner set up at the Skills level. I don't believe I can can target the SkillGroup individually because this is an OOTB structure and linked to Delve, etc. If I could set up refiners at the SkillGroup lever, this would

Using a refiner on a people search, the relevant refiners display (meaning if a user has that skill, the SkillGroup and Skills display in the Search Refiner WP. The problem is they display as one group of refiners void of any structure or hierarchy, like this:

skill
SkillsGroup
skill
SkillGroup
Skill
Skill

Inspecting the HTML there's no way to distinguish the terms as they all render the same. What i mean is there's no unique identifier that allows me to use some jQuery to apply styling to the terms to allow me to group them in a hierarchical order.

I'm open to any ideas or suggestions and appreciate any assistance in advance.

Answer 1

Before I posted this I had found this great blog post which highlights the issue and provides downloadable Display templates. His solution worked OOTB with single refiners, not multi; and I wasn't able to access the default SharePoint OOTB term stores on a hosted solution.

Anyway, what I did is modified the OOTB Filter_MultiValue.html located under masterpage > Display Templates > Search. I made a copy and edited the label by adding a value="_#= $htmlEncode(tokens) =#_". This allowed a unique ID to be passed which I could map using JavaScript/jQuery to my hierarchy.

The final result, after adding an accordion and some lipstick.