SharePoint 2013 – Taxonomy Fields returned as Dictionaries When using C# CSOM

I was trying to query a List with Taxonomy Fields using the CAML Query by Client Side Object Model (CSOM) by using C#. But, observed a strange behaviour.

The values returned as Dictionary and I am not able to iterate through the dictionary and get the appropriate value out of the result. In detail, the code which I used to retrieve is as follows

 private static List<string> PopulateLocations()
         {
             List<string> locationsList = new List<string>();
             using (ClientContext clientContext = new ClientContext("http://MySiteCollection"))
             {
                  
                 //The default network credential is nothing but the AppPool Account
                 clientContext.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;
                 Web web = clientContext.Web;
                 List locationList = web.Lists.GetByTitle("Configuration");
                 clientContext.Load(locationList);
                 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
 
 
                 var query = new Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.CamlQuery
                 {
                     ViewXml = @"<View>
                                          <Query>
                                           <Where>
                                         <IsNotNull>  
                                             <FieldRef Name='ColumnName' />   
                                                 </IsNotNull>
                                             </Where>     
                                          </Query>
                                      </View Scope='RecursiveAll'>"
                 };
 
                 Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ListItemCollection listItemCollection = locationList.GetItems(query);
 
                 clientContext.Load(listItemCollection);
                 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
 
                 foreach (ListItem item in listItemCollection)
                 {
                     clientContext.Load(item);
                     clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
 
                     System.Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToString(((Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Taxonomy.TaxonomyFieldValue)(item["column1"])).TermGuid));
                     locationsList.Add(((Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Taxonomy.TaxonomyFieldValue)(item["column1"])).TermGuid);
 
                 }
 
             }
             return locationsList;
         }
 

We were expecting the output as {Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Taxonomy.TaxonomyFieldValue}

But yet, you look at what is returned and notice that taxonomy fields are returning as dictionaries while all other fields return correctly.

The simple fix is we need to force the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Taxonomy to be loaded.

To do this, just before the code starts executing, we need to initialize an object as below.

TaxonomyItem dummy = new TaxonomyItem(clientContext,null);

This one line fixed my problem and now the results are coming properly as TaxonomyFieldValue

Happy Coding,

Sathish Nadarajan.