SharePoint Managed Metadata Hidden Taxonomy List - TaxonomyHiddenList

SharePoint provides a very handy feature to store frequently used values (read Terms or Keywords) along with parent-child relationships among them in the form of Taxonomy.

The Managed Metadata Service helps in configuring the Term Store, Term Sets, and Terms.

Further documents and data can be stored in lists or libraries within sites in SharePoint. There is a special site column of type "Managed Metadata" which can be used as a lookup for MMD Term Set values. These values can either be pre-defined values or user-provided keywords.

PROBLEM - Sometimes users will see empty values while MMD value selection or the value is shown as blank for existing list items.

REASON - The reason for such behavior is because of a hidden Taxonomy list managed by SharePoint called TaxonomyHiddenList.

This is a hidden list that is not visible to users directly and is stored at the top-level site collection. It can be accessed by using this URL - http://yoursiteURL/lists/taxonomyhiddenlist. All the MMD Term values are stored in this hidden list and are looked-up from this list and shown to the users via the MMD site column. Obviously, a user needs to have minimum READ permissions in order to view items from a SharePoint list. So the common problem here is the missing permissions on this hidden list. The site owner/administrator just needs to make sure that every user is having at least READ permissions on the TaxonomyHiddenList list.

Once the permissions have been adjusted and confirmed, all users will be able to see and add MMD values in lists and library items.

This will work in most of the case. But if the problem still persists then please contact your administrator, the issue could be related to something else.