Modern list experience: Fix filtering for Managed Metadata columns
the Sharepoint modern list experience is great, but incorrect filtering implementation for Managed Metadata columns prevents us from moving on to this new look.
Symptom: when creating a list Filter based on a "Managed Metadata" column, the behavior is as follows:
if the term set on which the Managed Metadata column is based on, contains more than 20 items, the user will have the ability to filter only on the first 20 items via checkboxes. All items in the term set beyond the 20th will be unavailable for filtering. This is because there is no ability to provide a filtering mechanism where the user can type (autocomplete) terms on which to base the filtering. Rather, the user has to select filtering based only on the first 20 items.
Additionally, the implementation is incorrect because, the offered 20 items are actually displayed even if some of them are explicitly deprecated in the Term store.
I've raised an SR with Microsoft and that is confirmed as incorrect behavior, however there appears to be no way of influencing MS product management to fix this beyond the Uservoice forum.
Thanks!

17 comments
-
Eric van Glabbeek commented
having the old "metadata navigation" option back in modern list would be super. currently heavenly used both on old sharepoint sites and even very old websites. site owners are not very willing to migrate to modern because of this :missing feature"
-
Douglas commented
Maybe this would help in certain cases.
* Enable the "Metadata Navigation and Filtering" Site Feature
* Configure the "Metadata Navigation Settings" from list settings
* The Managed Metadata columns configured in the previous step should now be filterable in the list view -
ivan.trundle commented
Is this not now fixed? We have term sets with thousands of entries, but when filtering in a library, only those terms used appear (the list is no longer restricted to the first 140 items).
-
Anonymous commented
This is very frustrating for us as well, losing functionality from Classic makes it difficult to switch to Modern. We have a Term Set which contains 5000+ terms.
As a workaround, I created a view with groups by this metadata field, and from there we can sort and filter the data. Not a "solution" but a workaround until MS comes up with something better. I hope this might help a few of you out..
-
Nathan commented
I have this same issue, cannot filter managed metadata items as it cuts off the list
-
Anonymous commented
Same issue here. An easy way to fix this whould be a Metadata search box like in the classic experience. It makes no sense to show all possible values and then limit to a subset.
-
Carry Megens commented
Facing the same issue. Enterprises have large term sets. Modern should deal with this. Or is Modern just plain and Simple and we should give up all hope this ever get's fixed?
-
Anonymous commented
Having the same problem, and also since the termset we are using is pretty large, the filter doesn't return all the possible terms. Wish it would just allow you to filter on the terms that have been selected.
-
Anonymous commented
Mind boggling this is the case. I'm in the process of trying to implement managed metadata at the moment, the principle is great but the implementation is a mess. The fact you can't implement a search to select drop down is mind-boggling.
The breadcrumb trail for the filtered list doesn't show the actual terms, but instead their numeric index, so if you want to widen your filtering you have no idea what your selecting or deselecting. Absolute shambles.
-
Anonymous commented
It is quite un-intuitive that filtering is based on the term store rather than the those values which have been used in the library being filtered. For it to then limit to the first 140 and not to provide a way to get to others renders filtering unusable.
One of my company's managed metadata fields has some 6000 different values which serve as location identifers. Many of our projects only involve a few locations but a current project covers hundreds.
There really needs to be a place for a user to type in the metadata they want to filter on. In our case it is a 5 digit number. When metadata is assigned to a new document it is very easy to allocate a location identifer but to then not be able to filter documents against a user choice of identifier completely undermines the value of using metadata.
Being fairly recent adopters of SharePoint Online we have used Modern for a year or so. Things which should be simple seem not have been invented for SharePoint yet, but long established and second nature in such as File Explorer and Excel.
-
Stefan Gebhardt commented
We came accross the same issue today. I am surprised that the number of people complaining about it is still quite low. This must affect a larger audiance...
-
Joel Chmiel commented
I'm working with a client on a library now and we're running into this. We're trying to move to modern, but this is a big deal / potential dealbreaker.
While things have improved...we now receive back the first 140 parent terms. (I don't know if that's because there's some children terms or if 140 is the new limit.) It's still very frustrating that there's no way to bring back more terms. It makes the field unusable for filtering.
Ideas:
- Add a text box at the top of this filter to allow for manually bringing back a subset of terms starting with whatever is typed.
- Add a next button to "page" through terms...which could make a call back to the term set, thus reducing the size of each query (assuming that's the real reason there's an arbitrary limit).In any case, this worked in classic with "Key Filters", but doesn't in modern. It's a real issue for users trying to move to modern. In this case, the term set has about 300 terms, so it's not huge, but we simply cannot use it for filtering. In another library, there's a term set with more and we'll have the same problem.
-
Ryan commented
Commenting again to mention just how unbelievably frustrating it is to use Microsoft products at times. We're trying to use SharePoint's enterprise-level functionality exactly how it's designed, and then MSFT turns around and drops support for this barely advanced functionality. Do I really have to wait for this fringe UserVoice to gain traction before MSFT will respect feature parity? Or maybe my company should just never adopt any sufficiently advanced MSFT features, because someday there will be a new version of the base tool and all our customizations will be unsupported.
-
Ryan commented
Critically important for us. This works in Classic, but not in Modern. We built term sets of several hundred employees and also several hundred customers so we can manage these values as terms in case of name changes, merges, acquisitions, etc. We need to be able to quickly sort/filter files and list items on this metadata w/ typeahead. Like I said, worked great in classic.
-
Sam commented
We’re experiencing the same issue with deprecated terms. Can we get an expected fix date to this issue?
-
Pablo commented
Robert: Can you list the SR? I would like to bring this to the MS support agent dealing with this issue.
-
Pablo commented
MS keeps saying this has been "implemented as designed", instead of admitting this is a bug. This is not the functionality present in libraries - only in the half-cooked "modern" ones, and only after mid-June, 2017. Previously, "modern" libraries used to show only the terms present in the documents included in the library.