Hide Hikashop Content Module if empty

-- HikaShop version -- : 3.1.1
-- Joomla version -- : 3.7.3

Hi,

there've been threads about hiding a cart module if it is empty and you now have the option "Hide if empty", but we face a similar issue with a Hikashop Content Module for recently viewed products. We wanted to display it in a sidebar, and hide the module position if there are no recent products, using:

<?php if($this->countModules('sidebar')): 
	echo '<div class="sidebar"> /* OUTPUT MODULE HERE */ </div>';
endif; ?>

Hi Philip,

because it doesn't work the way we want to, we haven't got a live URL for you to take a look, but it is quite easy to reproduce, hopefully the attached screenshots will help show the issue. Using the default protostar template, in the first screenshot you can see the pink sidebar on the left showing some recent products we viewed before, this works ok (edit: after submitting we see the order of the attachments is mixed up, but the images end with 1, 2, and 3).

If we clean our cache to pretend we're a new user who visits our webshop for the first time, the second screenshot shows what he will see. The sidebar is completely empty as you can also see in the Inspector at the bottom, but it is still showing.

The third screenshot is what we want, for the sidebar to be completely gone when there are no recently viewed products.

In Joomla it is common to hide/display a module position using

if($this->countModules('sidebar')):

Ok, thank you. Because you added the option "hide if empty" for the cart module some time ago, we just wondered if the same could be done for Hikashop Content Modules.

We've been searching for solutions as well and none of the links you gave work for the Hikashop Content Module unfortunately, since they all rely on checking the $module->content parameter which is always empty for this module, even when it does display products.

The only solution as far as we've been able to find, for anyone interested, is to render the module first "behind the scenes" and check if it outputs anything:

if(JModuleHelper::renderModule(reset(JModuleHelper::getModules( 'sidebar' )))!= ""):
      echo '<div class="sidebar"> /* OUTPUT MODULE HERE */ </div>';
endif;