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:



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

Enjoy.