Take your SharePoint social features to the next level with “I like it” and “Tags” counters: Part 2

In the previous part I talked about retrieving the number of tags by code. The problem was that the **GetTags **method from the SocialTagManager class, could only retrieve tags from a specific user.

In this part I show you a way to retrieve the all the tags for a specific location/page.

Decompile

My first step was to check the SocialTagManager class to see the code of the GetTags methods. The SocialTagManager class can be found in the Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.dll.

The SocialTagManager class contains 13 GetTags methods, and only four of them are public.

The method that could retrieve all the tags (a maximum of 1000) is the following GetTags(Uri url, Int32 maximumItemsToReturn, SocialItemPrivacy socialItemPrivacy).

It seems that this method does not use the current user of a specific user to filter the tags. The only problem is that this is an internal method.

The solution is to use reflection, this will allow you to make use of the GetTags(Uri url, Int32 maximumItemsToReturn, SocialItemPrivacy socialItemPrivacy) method.

Reflection

More information about reflection can be found here.

The first thing you need to do is retrieving all the nonpublic methods of your SocialTagManager class. This can be done as follows:

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// Retrieve the type of the SocialTagManager
var type = typeof(SocialTagManager);
// Get the nonpublic methods
MethodInfo[] methods = type.GetMethods(BindingFlags.NonPublic ' BindingFlags.Instance ' BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly);

Now that you got all the nonpublic methods, you can retrieve the GetTags method. I used the following statement to do this:

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MethodInfo method = methods.First(m => m.ToString() == "Microsoft.Office.Server.SocialData.SocialTag[] GetTags(System.Uri, Int32, Microsoft.Office.Server.SocialData.SocialItemPrivacy)");
if (method != null)
{
}

The only thing that rests is to invoke the retrieved GetTags method. This can be done like this:

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var itemTags = (SocialTag[])method.Invoke(stm, new object[] { uri, 1000, SocialItemPrivacy.PublicOnly });

When you use these code snippets in the console application from part 1, you should now get other results for the items (if you have enough tags, and likes).