ReferenceManyField - emptyText ignored

[olliebennett]

There appears to be no way to display an empty state message when there are no results from a <ReferenceManyField />, despite docs suggesting the emptyText (common) field is supported.

What you were expecting:

When no results are returned for a referenced field, I expected my <ReferenceManyField /> to display the text defined in its emptyText attribute.

What happened instead:

Nothing is displayed except the <ReferenceManyField />'s label attribute.

Steps to reproduce:

Using the code sandbox below, view the show screen of any Post without comments.

Related code:

CodeSandbox (forked from simple example) -> https://codesandbox.io/s/boring-swirles-zpxq5

Entirely unchanged except to add:

emptyText='There are no comments for this post'

in /posts/PostShow.tsx line ~ 101.

Other information:

The ReferenceManyField docs say that " also accepts the common field props." and emptyText is a common field prop.

Environment

• React-admin version: 3.17.2
• Last version that did not exhibit the issue (if applicable): UNKNOWN
• React version: 17.0.2
• Browser: Firefox
• Stack trace (in case of a JS error): N/A

[olliebennett]

I discovered the same is also true of ArrayField, and subsequently found discussion on #6179 covering the rationale.

TL;DR emptyText isn't supposed to work; it's a documentation issue.

The workaround is to use the child (eg. Datagrid's) empty attribute;

<ReferenceManyField ...>
  <Datagrid empty={<p>There are no comments for this post</p>}>
    ...

or, to style your text the same as a normal emptyText...

import Typography from '@material-ui/core/Typography'

<ReferenceManyField ...>
  <Datagrid empty={<Typography component='span' variant='body2'>There are no comments for this post</Typography>}>
    ...

Feel free to close this issue, although hopefully it will help someone coming across this limitation in future.

[fzaninotto]

Yep, I'll close this issue as a duplicate of #6179. Thanks for the detailed report anyway!