Dojo dgrid not displaying "No Results found" Message

i have this as my dgrid constructor ,

var MyQuickGrid = declare([onDemandGrid,Keyboard,Selection,ColumnHider,ColumnResizer,ColumnReorder]);

and the partial config_opts are

var config_opts = {
         loadingMessage: "   Loading data...",
     noDataMessage: "No results found."
        }

. . .

 lang.mixin(grid_opts,config_opts);
 window.grid = new MyQuickGrid(grid_opts,'node_of_intrest');

however when i request data from the server using a JsonRESTStore, and the returned json data is empty i.e "[]" the grid does not display the "noDataMessage", i initially thought this was because of the headers i was returning, since i was returning 200 OK even for empty results set, i changed this to 204 No Content but still nothing seems to be working. I would appreciate a work around, or even a way to know if the grid failed to get results cuz this native feature for some reasons seem to be too smart for me for now.

Mentioned by nbjoerg on IRC

make sure your JsonRest server is setting the proper Content-Range headers in its query responses (e.g. in this case it should be "items 0-0/0").

For more info on how Dojo expects JsonRest endpoints to behave, see http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/1.9/quickstart/rest.html

Here's an example of the headers returned by a JsonRest service for which noDataMessage displays fine:

Connection:Keep-Alive
Content-Length:2
Content-Range:items 0-0/0
Content-Type:application/json
Date:Thu, 19 Sep 2013 12:56:19 GMT
Keep-Alive:timeout=5, max=92
Server:Apache/2.2.12 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.12 OpenSSL/0.9.8k mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.0
X-Powered-By:PHP/5.3.0

And a screenshot, for good measure: