Add Custom Taxonomies to a Designer

Out of the box, a Sitefinity content widget lets you filter by the taxonomies it already knows about, which means categories and tags. Build a custom taxonomy, say a "Submission Type" classification, and the widget designer acts like it does not exist. There is no checkbox for it in the filter UI. That is a real gap if you organize content around your own taxonomies, which is half the reason to define them in the first place.

You can add it through the ViewMap. Credit for the approach goes to Rado, and with any luck it is obsolete by the time you read this because they built it into the UI natively. Until then this is how you do it.

The host type you are extending is Telerik.Sitefinity.Web.UI.ControlDesign.DynamicContentSelectorsDesignerView. The change is to add one more FilterSelectorItem into the Items collection of the filter selector:

<designers:FilterSelectorItem ID="FilterSelectorItem11" runat="server" Text="By Submission Type"
    GroupLogicalOperator="AND" ItemLogicalOperator="OR" ConditionOperator="Contains"
    QueryDataName="submissiontypes" QueryFieldName="submissiontypes" QueryFieldType="System.Guid">
    <SelectorResultView>
        <sitefinity:FlatTaxonSelectorResultView ID="FlatTaxonSelectorResultView1" runat="server"
            TaxonomyId="8C310B34-2E2D-4085-B252-90D4EE13E34E"
            WebServiceUrl="~/Sitefinity/Services/Taxonomies/FlatTaxon.svc"
            AllowMultipleSelection="true">
        </sitefinity:FlatTaxonSelectorResultView>
    </SelectorResultView>
</designers:FilterSelectorItem>

The piece that trips people up is matching the selector to the taxonomy type. A flat taxonomy uses the FlatTaxonSelectorResultView shown above. A hierarchical one needs the hierarchical selector pointed at its own service URL instead. The fastest way to get it right is to copy the markup Sitefinity already uses for categories, then swap in your field names and your taxonomy id. That GUID in TaxonomyId is yours to fill in, not the example value above, and getting it wrong is the difference between an empty selector and a working one.

This is not specific to one widget either. The same ViewMap edit works for news, blog posts, events, anything built on the dynamic content selectors, so once you have done it for one content type the pattern carries everywhere you need it.