Error when providing axis tickformat, but dataset is empty

I could not find this anywhere in reported/open/closed problems, so here goes. I'm dynamically fetching my dataset for plotly - and sometimes there is no data - a normal condition for my app. When providing a timestamp-like xaxis tickformat, an error will occur when the dataset is empty.

  Plotly.newPlot(this.chartTarget.id, {
    data: [
      { name: "Spot", type: "scatter", mode: 'lines', x: [], y: [], line: {color: 'black'} },
    ],
    layout: {
      title: "Blah",
      hovermode: "closest",
      hoverlabel: { bgcolor: "#FFF" },
      legend: { orientation: 'h', y: -0.3 },
      xaxis: { tickformat: "%H:%M", title: {text: "Time", automargin: true, standoff: 0}, zeroline: false },
      yaxis: { title: "YAxis" }
    },
    config: { responsive: true }
  });

When the dataset is empty alike above (and only when empty), a JS error will be thrown with a trace that looks like:

console.trace() WARN: encountered bad format: "%H:%M" plotly-finance.js:27425:18 warn plotly-finance.js:27425 warnBadFormat plotly-finance.js:25902 numberFormat plotly-finance.js:50110 numFormat plotly-finance.js:40235 formatLinear plotly-finance.js:40138 tickText plotly-finance.js:39918 setTickLabel plotly-finance.js:39477 calcTicks plotly-finance.js:39509 drawOne plotly-finance.js:40613 draw plotly-finance.js:40541 syncOrAsync plotly-finance.js:26272 draw plotly-finance.js:40534 drawAxes plotly-finance.js:31315 syncOrAsync plotly-finance.js:26272 _doPlot plotly-finance.js:31340 newPlot plotly-finance.js:31501

It seems like the format handler should be able to detect this situation and avoid the error when there's actually nothing to format in the first place.

Thanks for consideration and hopeful for a resolution within plotly itself for this potentially-expected condition.

plotly / plotly.js

Error when providing axis tickformat, but dataset is empty #7169