{"id":181,"date":"2011-11-01T11:32:40","date_gmt":"2011-11-01T15:32:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/?p=181"},"modified":"2011-11-01T11:34:35","modified_gmt":"2011-11-01T15:34:35","slug":"sharepoints-managed-metadata-service-is-not-case-sensitive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/?p=181","title":{"rendered":"SharePoint’s Managed Metadata service is NOT case sensitive"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve done programming in a variety of environments over the years.  Case sensitivity was one of the things that was the most difficult for me to get used to when I moved from VB to C# a number of years ago.  In fact if it weren\u2019t for Intellisense I would probably still be swearing at C# on a regular basis. I\u2019ve learned to live with, and even make use of, case sensitivity in my C# programs over the years.  But it doesn\u2019t come naturally.  I still tend to think in a case insensitive fashion.  <\/p>\n

As a result I was somewhat surprised to run into someone having an issue recently when trying to add SharePoint Managed Metadata terms to a user profile programmatically.  They reported that SharePoint wasn\u2019t consistent when adding terms to the Ask me About<\/strong><\/em> profile field programmatically.  It turns out that the real problem was that they had duplicate fields where the only difference was the case of the first character of the abbreviation.  After some investigation here\u2019s what I discovered.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. SharePoint won\u2019t let you add two metadata terms under the same parent if the only thing that differs is the case sensitivity of the term.  The image below shows what happens if you try to add \u201cABC\u201d as a term when \u201cAbc\u201d already exists under the same parent term.\n

    \"mms<\/a> <\/li>\n

  2. You can add (but probably shouldn\u2019t) a term that differs only based on case sensitivity if you also change the hierarchy that the term inherits from.  The image below shows the same \u201cABC\u201d term added to a different parent.  This time the addition is successful.\n

    \"MMS<\/a> <\/li>\n

  3. When you try to add any combination that starts with abc to a managed metadata column you get both terms.  You can of course choose the one you actually want, but that\u2019s based on the hierarchy of the term, not its case sensitivity.\n

    \"mms3\"<\/a> <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The lesson here is that unlike some things like C#, the Managed Metadata service is NOT case sensitive.  You should try to avoid adding terms to the service that differ only based on case sensitivity.  This is particularly true if you intend to add managed metadata to fields programmatically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I\u2019ve done programming in a variety of environments over the years.  Case sensitivity was one of the things that was the most difficult for me to get used to when I moved from VB to C# a number of years ago.  In fact if it weren\u2019t for Intellisense I would probably still be swearing at … Continue reading SharePoint’s Managed Metadata service is NOT case sensitive<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[19,53,6,51],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sharepoint-2010-dev","tag-development","tag-managed_metadata","tag-sharepoint_2010","tag-user_profiles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dontpapanic.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}