Hi Chris,

Firstly, I would like to sincerely apologize for the delayed response as we have been experiencing an unusually high number of tickets. I am sorry that it has taken longer than usual to respond to your concern and your patience is highly appreciated.

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1. In regards to your initial question, i am sorry, but at the moment we do not have any 'out of the box' solution to achieve a conditional table load like that, such as allowing the User to try some filter selection, and then depending if the table returns any rows for that filter range or not -  to not load a table at all if it's no rows returned.

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We do have the add-on Powerful Filters, which you can use to first present the User with a filter selection and hide the Table before they make their chose for one or more filters;

and only then to load the  filtered resulting Table.

 You can optionally add the "search" Button, too.

- Before purchase, you can test this Add-on's features on our sandbox site.

2. Displaying an Alert depending on a user's action on a table;

For that we also don't currently have any built-in solutions.

3. But if you found some workaround to partially achieve your use-case, and if you now just need to edit hiw the "No data available in table" appears /  or change color, etc;   we have possible workarounds to advise :

For example, If you simply wish to change the text displayed when there are no rows / matching records found,

there is a PHP file in the plugin that you can edit with any text/code editor, in this path:

/wp-content/plugins/wpdatatables/source/class.wdttools.php

The last time i checked, this piece of the code was on line 547,  but since we often update the plugin, the lines sometimes change over time,

so it is best to use "Ctrl+F" to search for this string : 'sZeroRecords'  and find this  :

'sZeroRecords' => __('No matching records found', 'wpdatatables'),

Here is my example :

Then, edit the line inside the brackets, and change it to anything you need,

in this example "No invoices found", so the line will be

'sZeroRecords' => __('No invoices found', 'wpdatatables'),

And this is the result, in one of my Test Tables :

Or if you wish to make that text just blank, you can do so - but then, the Table's Columns and appearance will still load, it will just be blank inside where the rows should be, rather than having that text.

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You can also use an image, if you wish.

We had a user who used an image, instead of the "No matching records found" :

So, if you create an appropriate image for this purpose,

you can simply add a HTML image tag, with the image source, like this for example :

'sZeroRecords' => __('<img src="https://yourDomain/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ImageName.svg">', 'wpdatatables'),

- Just to note, any time you update the wpDT plugin, it will overwrite the PHP file again; 

so, you will have to repeat this with the PHP code edit. 

I hope that might help.

If you have an idea what we might add in the future as a better solution, you can create a development suggestion.

Please feel free to search on our suggestions page, 

 to see if someone may be already suggested this feature. If you can't see it, feel free to add your suggestion there,  and as more people vote, the feature will move higher on the priority list.

You can certainly follow our changeLog page if you'd like ( it is also available in the plugin dashboard), where we state any changes/new features/bug fixes during updates;

and our newsletter, so you're informed about new features, bug fixes, freebies, etc.

If you have coding skills and wish to try to make a custom solution now for any point that is currently not available as 'built in',

you can check out our available hooks for Developers on this documentation and see if you can find any hook that might help.

Please be advised that custom solutions with hooks are not included in our support.

You can also research resources such as Stack Overflow to see if any other user perhaps found a workaround.

( We do like to give examples for certain solutions, but for this use-case, we, unfortunately, don't have anything yet)

Hi Chris,

Just a small follow up.

I am glad to see you found a workaround for your use-case, thank you for letting us know.

No problem, i am happy to share any possibly useful details we have on the subject.

We will, of course, do our best to make improvements in the future that would allow better/easier built-in ways to achieve it.

As you know, don't hesitate to open new tickets if anything else comes up.