How can I hide an empty row?

If you have no empty text, blocks should hide themselves if they return no results unless has something like the calendar style.

When I have more time I'll see if I can duplicate this; but if the block isn't hiding itself when it should, it's a bug.

I'm having the same problem. Images from an imagefield are supposed to display and when there's none to display for a particular node, it just displays the title of the view or block, nothing else. If I configure empty text it doesn't show up. I thought maybe I was missing something else until I found this issue!

Note that a field not having data is not the same, from Views perspective, as there being no rows returned.

Attached is a patch that fixes this bug. The problem was that the view template returned something non-empty even if the view was empty and there was no empty text.

No, this is wrong. It's a very specific case that blocks should hide; this patch causes pages that have no results to display no result either, and that's definitely not the right solution. There is a specific check for blocks to hide. Maybe it's failing but last I tested it it worked.

If pages that have no results display no results that seems right, doesn't it?

Where is this specific check for empty blocks that you mention? I have not been able to find it in the code and it is definitely not working for me.

No, because returning NULL causes the page not ot display at all, and you whitescreen. That's bad behavior.

I would like to help to fix this bug, but a hint about where the code is that is supposed to deal with empty blocks would help me.

Ok, I just tested this.

I created a very simple view. I gave it a filter that cannot pass (Specifically: nid == 0). I gave it a block view, and I put that block into my system.

The block does not appear.

The code that prevents the block from displaying exists in views_plugin_display_block::execute() which very specifically will not display the view if it has no results, no empty text, and does not have 'even empty' set in the plugin definition, which the base block does not.

The only way your view should be appearing is if you

1) have an empty text set (even a space will do it, and it's possible wysiwyg editors might put some invisible markup here that could cause the empty text to appear to be populated), 2) have a result that isn't actually displaying anything because all of the fields it would display are NULL.

But from my testing, this feature is working just fine.

Merlin, thank you very much for that very helpful response. I learned from it that the views module looks at $view->result to determine whether a block is empty, rather than looking at whether the content is empty. This allowed me to fix a bug in the tagadelic_views module which had a non-empty $view->result even when the block had no content.

Fayna in comment #4 probably has a similar problem that her block output is empty even if the list of nodes that are pulled up by the views module is not empty. I don't know how to circumvent the problem in her case though.

The answer to that problem is usually to provide proper filtering so that records with no data will not be considered results in the query.

Simple: Add Node: Title as a field. That one will have data, even if your field happens to have NULL. Remember, just because the fields are NULL does not mean a record was not retrieved from the database.

I am seriously going to go apopleptic here, because I am telling you what is wrong and I feel I am being deliberately ignored.

ADD SOME FILTERS TO YOUR VIEW TO REMOVE THE ROWS THAT HAVE NO VALUE.

Is this that hard?

The fact that there are additional queries being run PROVES that the view is getting results back. It's just that you are not displaying any fields that have results. The view you attached HAS NO FILTERS. So it will pull up whatever record the argument said to.

Let me quote myself, because you really, really, really need to read these sentences:

Simple: Add Node: Title as a field. That one will have data, even if your field happens to have NULL. Remember, just because the fields are NULL does not mean a record was not retrieved from the database.

The check cares about records being retrieved. The check does not give a rat's ass if you have fields that all have NULL. It does not KNOW and it does not CARE. You MUST add filters to remove these records. END. OF. STORY.

This is not a bug, this is you being too stubborn to actually pay attention to what I say, which I have to say, is upsetting on several levels. People who ask for my help, refuse to listen, argue with me, and then try to tell me that it's a bug are serious wasters of my time.

There isn't a 'first query'. It's all one query, which is my whole point. The fact that Node: Title has data tells you that a result was returned, and it's just that fields you're looking at don't have data.

There are many ways to to apply filters. Try adding Node: Nid as a filter, setting it to the relationship, and set the "is not empty" filter. You could also edit the relationship and set 'require this relationship', which I think appears on the node reference relationship. That will require there is actually a referenced node. You could also try adding a node: type filter, setting it to the relationship, and filtering that to only nodes that are valid in the relationship. Obviously that only works if your data is set up so that the related nodes are of different types.

There are probably other filtering options that would work as well, depending upon your data.

just for the record, here's how I fixed my recent commetns block from showing up with empty markup:
Added an extra filter for comment title not equal to NULL -- see the attached image to take a look.

I have a situation where I can't seem to come up with a filter scenario that works, and as a result blocks with no results are displaying.

We have Product pages on our site, and a block generated by a view (displayed through Panels) that shows all of the images on the site that are tagged as being associated with that product. There are two content types from which the images are pulled - the user's content profile and reviews that the user has posted. So the view is really pretty simple:

Argument is a taxonomy term

fields:
Photo 1
Photo 2

Filters are:
Node Is Published
Node is of Content Type "user_profile" or "review"

And this works perfectly as long as there are results. The problem is that when there are no results, we get the blank block. The only way I've been able to make the block go away when there are no photos is to add a filter for one of the Content: Photo types, and set it to "True" so that it only works if the photos are there.

However, there doesn't seem to be a way to filter for Photos that are of *either* type. because each one is an independent filter, if you don't have photos in one but you do in the other, the view comes back with empty rows, because it's looking at Filter 1 AND Filter 2.

Is there any way to specify an "OR" in this scenario?

Alternatively, what about the option to consider the view "empty" (or something similar) in the case where no results are returned?

sheesh. nevermind. I finished reading through this thread. The solution is a filter that looks for a node id > 0

works perfectly now.

i think i need to finish my coffee...

Yup, y'all need to read what merlin says...

I had this problem, just added filters for Published = Yes, and voila!!

Thanks. works for me. I had a content / image block, always empty on other nodes. simple filter (true) works perfect

sorry it did produce unwanted results later on, but i managed to fix it by adding another different filter such as that check the node type.

Hi,

Is there a way to hide a views row (in list style view) if all the fields are empty? I have a view that has only field. I have checked "Hide if empty" in field's setting. This works fine but the row (the li element) still displays. Since my li elements have CSS styles applied, they don't look good with empty fields. Is there a fix for this?

Use the not null filter on that field a6hiji7 like the screenshot on http://drupal.org/node/332762#comment-1848244

Thanks for the reply. My problem is a bit more complicated as I am using views customfield. Anyway, I got through the problem by overriding template_preprocess_views_view_list in my template.php file. Now the items don't show but the block still shows with the title (EDIT : even if there is no row).

Hi, I have a similar problem

I created a new content type and added a field named photo_field to it. Photo_field can store up to 8 images, default image is not provided. I then created a block view which displays these images in a grid. Added node:type and node:published filters, but block is displayed even if there are no images (I actually filled in "Empty text", but that message is never displayed as if there were results). I tried adding Content: Photos (field_photos) - delta is not empty (NOT NULL) filter but it doesn't help either.

Any ideas how to fix this?

EDIT: Adding Content: Photos (field_photos) - list:TRUE filter solved it. False alarm...

Manuel Garcia, I tried setting the comments:title filter to NULL as illustrated in your screenshot. It didn't work.
I have the content:author field in addition to the comment:title field. 'Thought I might need to set a filter=NULL for it as well (fishing for a solution). This also didn't work. I'm doing something wrong, but can't figure it out! I've attached a screenshot of my view. Are there some obvious details that I'm missing?

Thanks merlinofchaos,

Worked for me

Hi zydu,

I had same problem with my imagefield in view.

That got solved by adding filter such as:
field_photos_list=true

best of luck

It would still be nice that if all the fields displayed in a view are empty that views would recognize this and output nothing at all.