Android RecyclerView - Adding Empty View

So RecyclerView was introduced to replace List view and it's optimized to reuse existing views and so it's faster and more efficient as stated in the documentation:

https://developer.android.com/training/material/lists-cards.html

While using it, I faced the issue of missing a useful functionality that is implemented in ListView.
that feature is setting an empty view in case there was no records.

In ListView it was as simple as this

View emptyView = findViewById(R.id.mylist_empty_view);
ListView  myList = ....
myList.setEmptyView(emptyView);

but this method doesn't exist for recycler view so we need a work around until android team fixes this.


and here are the screen shots of both list view and recycler view fix

List view :

Recycler view :

here is how I fixed it:

	package com.example.androidsampleproject;
	import java.util.ArrayList;
	import java.util.List;
	import android.app.Activity;
	import android.os.Bundle;
	import android.support.v7.widget.LinearLayoutManager;
	import android.support.v7.widget.RecyclerView;
	import android.view.LayoutInflater;
	import android.view.View;
	import android.view.ViewGroup;
	import android.widget.TextView;
	public class RecyclerViewActivity extends Activity {
	RecyclerView recyclerView;
	@Override
	protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
	super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
	setContentView(R.layout.activity_recycler_view);
	recyclerView = (RecyclerView) findViewById(R.id.myList);
	recyclerView.setLayoutManager(new LinearLayoutManager(this));
	recyclerView.setAdapter(new MyAdapter());
	}
	private class MyAdapter extends RecyclerView.Adapter<RecyclerView.ViewHolder> {
	private List<String> dataList = new ArrayList<String>();
	public class EmptyViewHolder extends RecyclerView.ViewHolder {
	public EmptyViewHolder(View itemView) {
	super(itemView);
	}
	}
	public class ViewHolder extends RecyclerView.ViewHolder {
	TextView data;
	public ViewHolder(View v) {
	super(v);
	data = (TextView) v.findViewById(R.id.data_view);
	}
	}
	@Override
	public int getItemCount() {
	return dataList.size() > 0 ? dataList.size() : 1;
	}
	@Override
	public int getItemViewType(int position) {
	if (dataList.size() == 0) {
	return EMPTY_VIEW;
	}
	return super.getItemViewType(position);
	}
	@Override
	public void onBindViewHolder(RecyclerView.ViewHolder vho, final int pos) {
	if (vho instanceof ViewHolder) {
	ViewHolder vh = (ViewHolder) vho;
	String pi = dataList.get(pos);
	}
	}
	@Override
	public RecyclerView.ViewHolder onCreateViewHolder(ViewGroup parent, int viewType) {
	View v;
	if (viewType == EMPTY_VIEW) {
	v = LayoutInflater.from(parent.getContext()).inflate(R.layout.empty_view, parent, false);
	EmptyViewHolder evh = new EmptyViewHolder(v);
	return evh;
	}
	v = LayoutInflater.from(parent.getContext()).inflate(R.layout.data_row, parent, false);
	ViewHolder vh = new ViewHolder(v);
	return vh;
	}
	private static final int EMPTY_VIEW = 10;
	}
	}

view raw RecylerViewActivity.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub

here is the content of empty_view, it can be anything.

Enjoy.