Getting Term by the path in the taxonomy hierarchy

I’ve not found any built-in method to get a specific Term in the taxonomy hierarchy by specifying its path. I mean the name of the parent terms from the root TermSet and the name of the term itself, like “parent of the parent term name/parent term name/term name”. Terms having the same name may exist at multiple levels or branches of the taxonomy, so the name of the term is not necessarily unique within a TermSet, one can not use that to look up the exact Term.

So I’ve created an extension method that does just what I need, here is the code:

1. public static class Helper
2. {
3.     public static Term GetTermByPath(this TermSet termSet, String path)
4.     {
5.         Term result = null;
6.  
7.         String[] pathElements = path.Split(new Char[] { '/' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
8.  
9.         int depth = 0;
10.         result = termSet.Terms[pathElements[depth]];
11.  
12.         while (depth < pathElements.Length-1)
13.         {
14.             depth++;
15.             result = result.Terms[pathElements[depth]];
16.         }
17.  
18.         return result;
19.     }
20. }

In the following code we assume a term set hierarchy that was imported from the sample import CSV as I’ve discussed in a former post.

1. TaxonomySession session = new TaxonomySession(site);
2. TermStore termStore = session.TermStores["Managed Metadata Service"]; // replace it to fit your configuration
3. Group group = termStore.Groups["GroupName"]; // replace it to fit your configuration
4.  
5. TermSet termSet = group.TermSets["Political Geography"];
6. Term term = termSet.GetTermByPath("Continent/Political Entity/Country/Province or State/County or Region/City/District");

As usually the codes above are only for illustration purposes. If you would like to use them in a production code, you should add some kind of exception handling to them.

And please, let me know if you find this method in the standard API!

Tags: SP 2010, Taxonomies