Display something other than "Nothing to See Yet" when inside a top-level folder (with sub-collections inside it)?

My question has to do with the aesthetics of the Metabase interface when dealing with the navigation structure of collections in sub-collections.

I didn't see anything in the admin settings, so I thought I'd ask here.


Let's say I've clicked on a "top-level" collection, i.e. a collection which itself does not directly have dashboards inside of it, but has sub-collections inside of it, which in turn contain dashboards. This is something I generally like about Metabase; you organize your files as you would in your own computer's operating system / folder structure.

What's a bit strange, however, is that in these cases, there is a message "Nothing to see yet." taking up more than three-quarters of the screen (see screenshot below).

Now, of course, the user can figure out that there are more folders to click through until they finally get to the content, but I find it a bit strange that this giant screen is shown instead of something a bit more useful, like – say – some sort of visual indication of the content hierarchy (e.g. kind of like what is in the left pane). Or at least something other than "nothing to see yet", which is actually misleading.

Is there some kind of visualization setting I can adjust to show something else instead of this screen? Or perhaps you can suggest some sort of "hack" / workaround? I'd prefer to keep the current folder structure in Metabase, as I find this a very pleasant way to logically organize dashboards into their respective topics, sub-topics, etc.

Thank you!

Hi @alarmingboots
This probably deserves it's own UX issue: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/new/choose
The only workaround I can think of is adding a "placeholder" question or dashboard, which you can call "See the sidebar for sub-collections, which contains all the information".

Hi @flamber,

Thanks for the super quick answer. Yes, your workaround was what I was also thinking, but I agree that this is a good candidate for a new UX issue -- thanks for the suggestion.

I went ahead and created one: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/19070

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