Enhancing APEX "no data found" message

Truth be told, the default "no data found" message for APEX reports is pretty boring.

Out of the box

Even the default wording irritates me just a little bit every time I see one amidst a page I thought was looking pretty snazzy.

There are two things I've done recently to make it look a little better.

1) Surround it with a nice soft coloured box.

Something with a little pop

This is pretty simple, just add the following CSS to your page (Edit page properties -> Inline CSS) or application's .css file. Tweak it to your heart's content - just no blinking text, please.

span.nodatafound {
  font-size:120% !important;
  border: 1px solid #FC0;
  background: #FFC;
  color: #384F34;
  display: block;
  font-weight: bold;
  margin: 2px auto 14px;
  padding: 15px !important;
  text-align: left;
}

2) Customise the output

Speaking of cats (if you clicked through the reference), there are probably a few ways to skin this one.

If you create a dynamic action the fires after refresh of your report region, you can execute this JavaScript

var ndf;
switch($v('P4_REPORT_SEARCH').length)
{
case 1:
  ndf="One character and you found no records?!";break;
case 2:
  ndf="Make sure there is no type";break;
default:
  ndf="No employees by this name, sorry.";
}

$('span.nodatafound').text(ndf);

And that's it!

See a demonstration on this sample search page. Note it refreshes the report on key release. Try type letters not found in the emp table.