Almost every iOS application uses UITableView to display some kind of data and in many cases the data can be missing. In such situation you typically want to display some kind of “no data” placeholder. The placeholder fills in the empty space and can tell the user what needs to be done to get the data.
There are many ways wo implement such “no data” placeholder, including using libraries like UIEmptyState. If you just need to display a simple text message, there is an really easy way to implement it yourself, as I did in a recent project.
Showing and hiding the placeholder
The easiest way to create a “no data” placeholder for UITableView is to set it as the background view. It will be shown when there is no data in the UITableView so it will not be hidden under any other wiew.
I created a simple UITableView extension to show the placeholder with a specific message
extension UITableView {
func setNoDataPlaceholder(_ message: String) {
let label = UILabel(frame: CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: self.bounds.size.width, height: self.bounds.size.height))
label.text = message
// styling
label.sizeToFit()
self.isScrollEnabled = false
self.backgroundView = label
self.separatorStyle = .none
}
}To hide it when no longer needed I created another extension method
extension UITableView {
func removeNoDataPlaceholder() {
self.isScrollEnabled = true
self.backgroundView = nil
self.separatorStyle = .singleLine
}
}With this I would have to call those two extension method manually depending on the data in the UITableView which is unnecessary manual work.
