If sidebar content is empty string…

Hi all,

Apologies in advance if this is a silly question. (Relative developer n00b.)

I’m working with a client’s custom plugin on a site. How it works is, you drag a widget that the plugin creates into its own custom sidebar. Then, on a page-by-page basis, you can enable this sidebar or disable it. What I’m trying to do is, if the page has the sidebar enabled, show that ‘custom’ sidebar, otherwise show a default.

Where I’m stuck is, is_active_sidebar still returns true for the ‘custom’ sidebar even if the plugin returns false. Here’s my code:

<?php
    if(function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')){
        if(is_active_sidebar('sidebar_custom')){
          dynamic_sidebar('sidebar_serivces_leadgen_footer');
        }
        elseif(is_active_sidebar('sidebar_serivces_secondary_footer')){
          dynamic_sidebar('sidebar_serivces_secondary_footer');
        }
    }
?>

Is there a way to check if the sidebar content is an empty string (which is the case when the sidebar is disabled on a page)? Or to have the plugin make its sidebar ‘think’ that it’s empty by returning false or exiting or something like that?

Thank you in advance.