In a SharePoint version previous to SharePoint 2010 I was a Site Admin for a SharePoint site where we used metadata hierarchy to categorize documents uploaded to the Shared Documents library. The way that we set it up then for when a document is uploaded and one was setting the required document attributes there were three (3) drop-down lists to categorize the document.
The values of the drop-down list for the 2nd field attribute was determined by the value selected for the first drop-down attribute. Then the values of the drop-down list for the 3rd field attribute was determined by the value selected for the second drop-down attribute.
This made is much better for the group-by feature for a view in that all three of these attributes could be used to group the documents satisfying the view filter requirements.
In essence this is a manual way to set up managed metadata without using SharePoint 2010's Term Store Management.
We managed this by creating some sort of SharePoint list outside of the Shared Documents library and these field attributes created for the Shared Documents library pointed to this external list as valid values for their drop-down values which would dynamically change for the subsequent field attributes which were driven by the value selected for the previous field attributes.
The problem is I cannot remember how we did that and if this functionality can be implemented in SharePoint 2010. I would appreciate if someone could tell me how this is done and if this can be done in SharePoint 2010 and if so can it be done without SharePoint Designer or InfoPath or any other SharePoint programming tool. Thank you!