Equivalent of ListView.setEmptyView in RecyclerView

Question

In RecyclerView, I want to set an empty view to be shown when the adapter is empty. Is there an equivalent of ListView.setEmptyView()?

Answer 1

If you want to support more states such as loading state, error state then you can checkout https://github.com/rockerhieu/rv-adapter-states. Otherwise supporting empty view can be implemented easily using RecyclerViewAdapterWrapper from (https://github.com/rockerhieu/rv-adapter). The main advantage of this approach is you can easily support empty view without changing the logic of the existing adapter:

public class StatesRecyclerViewAdapter extends RecyclerViewAdapterWrapper {
    private final View vEmptyView;

    @IntDef({STATE_NORMAL, STATE_EMPTY})
    @Retention(RetentionPolicy.SOURCE)
    public @interface State {
    }

    public static final int STATE_NORMAL = 0;
    public static final int STATE_EMPTY = 2;

    public static final int TYPE_EMPTY = 1001;

    @State
    private int state = STATE_NORMAL;

    public StatesRecyclerViewAdapter(@NonNull RecyclerView.Adapter wrapped, @Nullable View emptyView) {
        super(wrapped);
        this.vEmptyView = emptyView;
    }

    @State
    public int getState() {
        return state;
    }

    public void setState(@State int state) {
        this.state = state;
        getWrappedAdapter().notifyDataSetChanged();
        notifyDataSetChanged();
    }

    @Override
    public int getItemCount() {
        switch (state) {
            case STATE_EMPTY:
                return 1;
        }
        return super.getItemCount();
    }

    @Override
    public int getItemViewType(int position) {
        switch (state) {
            case STATE_EMPTY:
                return TYPE_EMPTY;
        }
        return super.getItemViewType(position);
    }

    @Override
    public RecyclerView.ViewHolder onCreateViewHolder(ViewGroup parent, int viewType) {
        switch (viewType) {
            case TYPE_EMPTY:
                return new SimpleViewHolder(vEmptyView);
        }
        return super.onCreateViewHolder(parent, viewType);
    }

    @Override
    public void onBindViewHolder(RecyclerView.ViewHolder holder, int position) {
        switch (state) {
            case STATE_EMPTY:
                onBindEmptyViewHolder(holder, position);
                break;
            default:
                super.onBindViewHolder(holder, position);
                break;
        }
    }

    public void onBindEmptyViewHolder(RecyclerView.ViewHolder holder, int position) {
    }

    public static class SimpleViewHolder extends RecyclerView.ViewHolder {
        public SimpleViewHolder(View itemView) {
            super(itemView);
        }
    }
}

Usage:

Adapter adapter = originalAdapter();
StatesRecyclerViewAdapter statesRecyclerViewAdapter = new StatesRecyclerViewAdapter(adapter, emptyView);
rv.setAdapter(endlessRecyclerViewAdapter);

// Change the states of the adapter
statesRecyclerViewAdapter.setState(StatesRecyclerViewAdapter.STATE_EMPTY);
statesRecyclerViewAdapter.setState(StatesRecyclerViewAdapter.STATE_NORMAL);