I thought this would be a very common thing but couldn't find how to handle it in Angular JS. Let's say I have a list of events and want to output them with angular, then that's pretty easy:
<ul>
<li ng-repeat="event in events">{{event.title}}</li>
</ul>
But how do I handle the case when the list is empty? I want to have a message box in place where the list is with something like "No events" or similar. The only thing that would come close is the ng-switch with events.length (how do I check if empty when an object and not an array?), but is that really the only option I have?
You can use ngShow.
<li ng-show="!events.length">No events</li>
See example.
Or you can use ngHide
<li ng-hide="events.length">No events</li>
See example.
For object you can test Object.keys.
And if you want to use this with a filtered list here's a neat trick:
<ul ng-repeat="item in filteredItems = (items | filter:keyword)">
...
</ul>
<div ng-hide="filteredItems.length">No items found</div>
You might want to check out the angular-ui directive ui-if if you just want to remove the ul from the DOM when the list is empty:
<ul ui-if="!!events.length">
<li ng-repeat="event in events">{{event.title}}</li>
</ul>
With the newer versions of angularjs the correct answer to this question is to use ng-if:
<ul>
<li ng-if="list.length === 0">( No items in this list yet! )</li>
<li ng-repeat="item in list">{{ item }}</li>
</ul>
This solution will not flicker when the list is about to download either because the list has to be defined and with a length of 0 for the message to display.
Here is a plunker to show it in use: http://plnkr.co/edit/in7ha1wTlpuVgamiOblS?p=preview