You can now assign taxonomy during form submission, in the cloud! Nintex Forms for Office 365 is introducing the new Managed Metadata Control that allows you to do just that. This control allows consistent allocation of metadata, in a form submission context. This results in improved content discoverability and metadata enabled navigation to underlying lists and libraries.

SharePoint’s Managed Metadata is information about information. For example, a product’s type identification number and preferred location can be its metadata. You can organize the metadata structure in a way that makes sense to your business context and use metadata when aggregate or searching for the said item. For more information on this concept, read this introductory article on Managed Metadata in Office 365.

Once you have setup your taxonomy, implementing the new Managed Metadata control in your form is simple. I will take you through a quick end-to-end textual/pictorial demonstration.

We will start with the list. When setting up the list, you can either explicitly add a new column of type “Metadata” or add an unbound metadata control to the form designer. In this example, we will add a Preferred Product Location(s) as a bound Metadata column.

In the list column settings, you set the Termset to Location

In addition, we will allow this column to contain Multiple Values.

Please Note:- These two settings are available at the control level if you are using an unbound column. When designing the form, simply add the Managed Metadata control to the designer from the list controls. 

The Managed Metadata control is under SharePoint Controls, if you would like to add an unbound column.

And you are DONE!. Of course, publish your form.

Moving on to end user experience - when the user submits the form, they can start typing in locations and will be assisted with values from the term set. 

Alternatively, the user can select the value(s) by clicking on the Terms icon.

Also if you observe, when the user enters the value, the interface will display it as a tag. The tag also contains a “X” button to delete the value. The MMD control currently does not support 'Fill in value choices' despite the SharePoint metadata column supporting it. This decision adds weightage towards formal taxonomy and gives control to the Term set administrator so they can govern the classification. If the user enters a value that is not present in the Termset, they are prompted with a warning message upon form submission about the unresolved entry.

The Managed Metadata control is already available in the SharePoint on-premises versions of Nintex forms. Following the adoption of this powerful control in our on-premises product and the steady need for this functionality in our cloud offering, we at Nintex are very excited in adding this functionality to our Cloud Forms offering. We believe our customers will derive immense value by implementing a managed taxonomy.

And as always, thank you for your time.