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

Using the backgroundView is fine, but it does not scroll nicely like in Mail.app.

I did something similar to what xtravar did.

I added a view outside the view hierarchy of the tableViewController.

Then i used the following code in tableView:numberOfRowsInSection::

if someArray.count == 0 {
    // Show Empty State View
    self.tableView.addSubview(self.emptyStateView)
    self.emptyStateView.center = self.view.center
    self.emptyStateView.center.y -= 60 // rough calculation here
    self.tableView.separatorColor = UIColor.clear
} else if self.emptyStateView.superview != nil {
    // Empty State View is currently visible, but shouldn't
    self.emptyStateView.removeFromSuperview()
    self.tableView.separatorColor = nil
}

return someArray.count

Basically I added the emptyStateView as a subview of the tableView object. As the separators would overlap the view, I set their color to clearColor. To get back to the default separator color, you can just set it to nil.