ApEx 4: after upgrade, "when no data found" message on report not shown

Question

I have a page that displays a tabular form. Initially, the table is empty, and so I have text in the "when no data found" block of the report attributes.
After upgrading to ApEx 4, this text is no longer shown when no results are returned. It displays the table header, but no rows. So for some reason, it thinks data is being returned -- even though the table is completely empty. I've tried several permutations, but have not been able to find a workaround.
I'll try to set up a standalone page, but I can provide a pointer to the existing page on apex.oraclecorp.com on request.
UPDATE: I think this may be related to the bug I reported on tabular forms.
Is it possible that the empty, hidden row we are adding now counts as a returned row, even though the SELECT statement returned nothing? And thus the report never thinks that there is no data found? This would also explain why it's displaying the table headers, even though no rows are visible.
Edited by: kswartz on Jul 8, 2010 12:18 AM

Answer 1

Interesting. I didn't see anything about this change in behavior in the Release Notes. Did I miss something? It definitely didn't do this in 3.2.
Overall, I think that's actually a very non-obvious change. Seeing a set of table headers with nothing below it looks to me like a mistake. Why would you ever show headers for something when you have no rows? In fact, I thought that was a bug the minute I saw it. With due respect, I don't think the new design is less desirable from a usability perspective than the old one.
It also doesn't work as you described regarding the proportions: in my case, the columns in the header row did not match the sizes of the columns as I defined them. Although I didn't place anything beside the tabular form, if I had, it would still alter the layout when "Add Rows" is clicked. If you know what the size of those columns is supposed to be (because they are text fields of size xyz, for instance), why wouldn't you define the header cells to use that information? You won't get it exact most of the time, but you can get close, if they're all text fields of specific width.
Plus, there's nothing on the Report Attributes tab that indicates the "When No Data Found" option won't apply if you are using a tabular form. The textareas should be disabled -- and at the very least, the on-line help should be mentioning this. It doesn't mention anything about this only applying to standard reports.
Finally, I think you should also put this in the Release Notes, because this requires changes to any application where someone with a tabular form required this. In one case, that was where I provided instructions to users entering data for the first time. Now I have to move it. (Not a big deal, but it would have been nice to know that in advance.) On another page, I put a JavaScript block in there to submit and automatically add a row, because I wanted there to always be a blank row if nothing had been entered -- and that was the easiest way. Okay, granted, that's probably not something you intended to support, but there was nothing wrong with it, technically. And, again, it's fixed by moving that block to the header instead and testing for the number of rows in the table -- easy, now that you provide JQuery for us -- but still manual migration work.
Thanks for the explanation.