All language subtitles for 6.checking-for-empty-collection

Before we wrap up this module, I want to implement one more thing

here in the Home template. At the moment we have two posts in the

database, but what if we had none?

Let's test this scenario. Inside of the phpMyAdmin,

I will remove both of the existing posts from the database.

You can also do that in the command line or in whichever way you

prefer, as long as the posts table is empty.

If I refresh the Home page now, you can see that all we get is

a blank page, which is kind of expected,

but again, this is not really good user experience.

We could of course add an if directive first to check if the post

collection is empty before rendering this foreach loop, and there is

nothing wrong with that approach. However,

there is a better built‑in way to do this. Instead of using

foreach, let's use the forelse directive.

The functionality of these two directives is basically the same,

but we get some additional features with forelse.

We can add this empty directive inside of the forelse block

to define what would happen if the variable that we are

trying to loop over is empty.

If that's the case, I will render a simple message.

This empty directive works kind of like an else statement. And if I refresh the

Home page now, you can see that instead of a blank page, we now get this useful

message informing us that everything is fine,

but there are no posts in the database yet.

Maybe this doesn't seem like something important, but I think

that you will often have the need to show something else in case

that there is no data to display.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to post them in the discussion.