iOS Displaying block text in place of a UITableView

An app i'm working on uses a UITableViewController in a few places to display a list of data. The elements are objects that a user adds and the default state of the table is blank. Each element that is added becomes an option for a NavigationController.

Currently in the default state with a blank table it's not immediately obvious to my test users that they should add an element. The method of data entry is a "+" button on the top right, but I think a brief instruction in the main window would help a lot.

So what I'd like to do is display a short explanation of the purpose of that section to the user. Basically "Please click the + icon to add an entry". I'd like that text to only display when the table has zero elements.


What I was thinking about trying was maybe something in the viewController's viewDidLoad or viewWillAppear method that checks if the data source has zero elements, and then replace the tableView object with some sort of textView or UIView with just some basic text. Maybe that's the right way of doing it, but I'm really not sure.

If someone could just point me in the right direction here, I'm sure I can figure out the implementation details myself, if there is a good way of doing this.

I experimented with the AlertView at first, but it wasn't really happy with the results. I've seen a few apps that do what I'm talking about. I guess I could do it as a conditional background image of some sort for the TableView. I haven't looked into that yet either. Right now I'm still in the "brainstorming" phase for this feature.

Oh, duh. Ok, I think I know what I need to do now. Thanks

I'm think i'm going to either go with your second option, or have the tableview display a subview with instructions when there's nothing in the table. I'll just see which one works better. But yeah, it will definitely be something that once there's data it will never get seen again.