Making ADF af:table emptyText appear with padding using some CSS

I've been doing a fair amount of ADF work recently and especially dealing with tables. What I found was that when a table contained no data, the emptyText string rendering is very ugly by default, so I got exploring. It turns out you can put HTML into this string and customise how it is rendered with some CSS.

Here is what I mean by ugly, there really should be some padding on the left of the text.

My end result was to add a small amount of padding to align the emptyText to the table header. It looked like this:

Much more pleasant to look at!

To get this to work, I had to put HTML into the emptyText attribute of af:table. Here's a code snippet:

af:table snippet

<af:table

...

emptyText="<html><span style="padding-left:2px;">No Data<span></html>"

The CSS adds a 2-pixel padding on the left of the text, it's as simple as that.

Note that the start of the tags have to be escaped, this had me stuck for a while. Also note that the entire string has to be encompassed inside a <html> element.

-i