bool(DashTable) is always False

[JakkuSakura]

Describe your context

dash                      2.17.1
dash-core-components      2.0.0
dash-html-components      2.0.0
dash-table                5.0.0

Describe the bug
bool(DashTable) is always False. I can't use tb or [] for shorthand when there is no data

from dash import dash_table
df = pd.DataFrame({'a': [1, 2]})
tb = dash_table.DataTable(df.to_dict('records'), columns=[{'name': column, 'id': column} for column in df.columns])
print(bool(tb))

Expected behavior

bool(tb) evaluates to True, either always or when there is data

Screenshots

[T4rk1n]

The condition for components is based on it's __len__ property,

dash/dash/development/base_component.py

Lines 369 to 389 in 1cb7455

	def __len__(self):
	"""Return the number of items in the tree."""
	# TODO - Should we return the number of items that have IDs
	# or just the number of items?
	# The number of items is more intuitive but returning the number
	# of IDs matches __iter__ better.
	length = 0
	if getattr(self, "children", None) is None:
	length = 0
	elif isinstance(self.children, Component):
	length = 1
	length += len(self.children)
	elif isinstance(self.children, (tuple, MutableSequence)):
	for c in self.children:
	length += 1
	if isinstance(c, Component):
	length += len(c)
	else:
	# string or number
	length = 1
	return length

It only looks for the children prop to determine this and the DataTable doesn't have a children prop. You can workaround this by looking at bool(tb.data) instead.

[alexcjohnson]

Would it be reasonable to add an explicit __bool__ for components that’s always True? That could be useful for cases where a variable might be a component or might be None.

[JakkuSakura]

Yeah it would be helpful

[JakkuSakura]

bool(tb.data) it's not a direct replacement of bool(tb), as it might be None and raise None value exception