How to prevent horizontal scroll bar getting hidden when TableView has no items?

Question

I'm developing a JavaFX application and using TableView to display data from database. Columns don't always fit horizontally so the horizontal scroll bar appears. My users requested a per column filter feature which I implemented putting a TextField into the table column header and using a FilteredList for table contents. As the user types the filter predicate gets updated. This works, the users love it. But there is a nasty corner case. When the column being filtered lays outside the normal viewport of TableView and the user filters out all data the TableView just resets, the horizontal scroll bar gets hidden. From here there is no way to access the filtering TextField as it's outside the viewport and the horizontal scroll bar is not available. Is there a way to prevent the horizontal scroll bar getting hidden when TableView has no items? I didn't find anything in the API docs.

Answer 1

After looking at the source code of TableViewSkin and TableViewSkinBase I come up with a quick and dirty workaround:

    tv.setSkin(new TableViewSkin<Document>(tv) {
        @Override
        protected int getItemCount() {
            return super.getItemCount()+1;
        }
    });

It fakes an extra row so the code that would triggers when the table is empty never runs. The extra space after the last row of data doesn't bother my users.