I have an object model that has a related list, and on a Visualforce page I am displaying a fully custom UI for this related list.

The issue is that I need to only display a section if the related list has records, but due to the styling there is a div that is outside the repeater that needs to be hidden if the related list is empty.

I attempted using the .size(), ISNULL, ISEMPTY on the visualforce page, but those don't work, either they throw an error or don't return the expected results.

Is there a way to determine if a related list is populated without using a custom apex extension or including a rollup field that counts the number of related objects?