Handling an empty UITableView. Print a friendly message

Question

I have a UITableView that in some cases it is legal to be empty. So instead of showing the background image of the app, I would prefer to print a friendly message in the scr

Answer 1

Based on the answers here, here is a quick class I made that you can use on in your UITableViewController.

import Foundation
import UIKit

class TableViewHelper {

    class func EmptyMessage(message:String, viewController:UITableViewController) {
        let rect = CGRect(origin: CGPoint(x: 0,y :0), size: CGSize(width: self.view.bounds.size.width, height: self.view.bounds.size.height))
        let messageLabel = UILabel(frame: rect)
        messageLabel.text = message
        messageLabel.textColor = UIColor.blackColor()
        messageLabel.numberOfLines = 0;
        messageLabel.textAlignment = .Center;
        messageLabel.font = UIFont(name: "TrebuchetMS", size: 15)
        messageLabel.sizeToFit()

        viewController.tableView.backgroundView = messageLabel;
        viewController.tableView.separatorStyle = .None;
    }
}

In your UITableViewController you can call this in numberOfSectionsInTableView(tableView: UITableView) -> Int

override func numberOfSectionsInTableView(tableView: UITableView) -> Int {
    if projects.count > 0 {
        return 1
    } else {
        TableViewHelper.EmptyMessage("You don't have any projects yet.\nYou can create up to 10.", viewController: self)
        return 0
    }
}

With a little help from http://www.appcoda.com/pull-to-refresh-uitableview-empty/