Refinement panel with hierarchy of managed metadata in SharePoint 2013

Question

I'm implementing managed metadata in a SharePoint 2013 on premise environment. This environment will have a lot of document libraries that make use of content types. In these content types, a site column (connected to the managed metadata) 'Department' will be implemented.

In the search center, i configured this field as a refiner to let the user filter all documents/items by this department field (term). Now every departement also has a kind of 'subdepartment' (subterm). What I want to achieve is that if a user selects a 'root'-department term (for example IT), also the documents that are tagged with the child term (for example IT-functional) will be shown in the search results.

I know it's possible to achieve this in a content query webpart (include child terms) so I hope this is possible in the search center too.

Anyone knows how to configure this or get this implemented? It would be a huge improvement! I already searched the internet but nothing worked for me :(

Thanks in advance!

Kind regards,

Deefken

Answer 1

You'd need to implement or buy a custom display template for your managed metadata refiner. This would allow you to modify the query sent to the search results webpart when a parent term is clicked to include those results tagged with its children instead of just with it alone (using the {Term.IDWithChildren} variable)

To avoid confusing users, you may want to expose the tag hierarchy in the refiner or result item display templates so they understand the parent/child relationship.