How to make a table View with message showing if tableview empty? - swift

Question

I am building a tableView which displays a message when empty.
I'm using the really helpful answers on this question (Handling an empty UITableView. Print a friendly message) This has led me to a function:
func emptyMessage(message:String, viewController:UITableViewController) {
let VCSize = viewController.view.bounds.size
let messageLabel = UILabel(frame: CGRect(x:0, y:0, width:VCSize.width, height:VCSize.height))
messageLabel.text = message
messageLabel.textColor = UIColor.black
messageLabel.numberOfLines = 0
messageLabel.textAlignment = .center;
messageLabel.font = UIFont(name: "Futura", size: 15)
messageLabel.sizeToFit()
viewController.tableView.backgroundView = messageLabel;
viewController.tableView.separatorStyle = .none;
}
I could call this in every table views data source like this :
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
}
}
which would work. However I would rather not have to implement that repeatedly and instead have one custom tableview with a method in the data source asking what message you would like to add.
I've tried extending the TableView class or making a subclass of tableView but I think this isn't the solution. Instead I think the solution is to overwrite the UITableViewDataSource protocol but my knowledge of protocols and delegation isn't sufficient.
I hope i'm on the right track with this. And to clarify I could do it in the way mentioned above but i'm trying to override the functionality to make a smart solution where i'm not repeating myself.

Answer 1

There is a very good library :
https://github.com/dzenbot/DZNEmptyDataSet
This can be used for all types of containers like UITableView, UICollectionView etc.
After conforming to some DZNEmptyDataSetSource, DZNEmptyDataSetDelegate , you can simply implement these functions:
func title(forEmptyDataSet scrollView: UIScrollView) -> NSAttributedString? {
let str = "Empty Data."
let attrs = [NSFontAttributeName: UIFont.preferredFont(forTextStyle: UIFontTextStyle.headline)]
return NSAttributedString(string: str, attributes: attrs)
}
func description(forEmptyDataSet scrollView: UIScrollView) -> NSAttributedString? {
let str = "Any Details about empty data."
let attrs = [NSFontAttributeName: UIFont.preferredFont(forTextStyle: UIFontTextStyle.body)]
return NSAttributedString(string: str, attributes: attrs)
}
Apart from that, you can add a button to to perform some actions. Please refer the library for more features.