How to raise error message if data does not exist in django table

Question

I have my table and filter all set up and working but I wish to have an error functionality added to it in such a way that when I query a data which exist in the db, it should show me the result normally, however, when I input a qs which does not exist, it should show me a message on the table that says "record does not exist" instead of a blank table.

Here is my view:

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.shortcuts import render
from django_tables2 import RequestConfig
from django_tables2.export import TableExport

from .models import Employee
from .models import EmployeeFilter
from .tables import EmployeeTable


@login_required()
def employees(request):
    filter = EmployeeFilter(request.GET, queryset=Employee.objects.all())
    table = EmployeeTable(filter.qs)
    RequestConfig(request).configure(table)
    count = Employee.objects.all().count()
    male_count = Employee.objects.filter(gender__contains='Male').count()
    female_count = Employee.objects.filter(gender__contains='Female').count()
    user_count = User.objects.all().count()

    export_format = request.GET.get("_export", None)

    if TableExport.is_valid_format(export_format):
        exporter = TableExport(export_format, table)
        return exporter.response("table.{}".format("csv", "xlsx"))

    return render(request, "employees/employees.html", {
        "table": table,
        "filter": filter,
        "count": count,
        "male_count": male_count,
        "female_count": female_count,
        "user_count": user_count,
    })

Form Template:

<!--filter form-->
                            <form action="" class="form form-inline employee-filter-form" method="get">
                                <legend class="mb-2">Filter employee records</legend>
                                <div class="fieldWrapper"> 
                                    {{ filter.form.first_name }}
                                </div>
                                <div class="fieldWrapper">
                                    {{ filter.form.last_name }}
                                </div>
                                <button aria-expanded="false" aria-haspopup="true"
                                        class="ml-2 btn btn-danger filter-btn" type="submit">
                                    Filter
                                </button>
                            </form>

Answer 1

You can handle it in your template. Just check if queryset you are passing is empty or not:

{% if queryset %}
    {% for i in queryset %}
        {{ i.text }}  
    {% endfor  %}
{% else %}
    Error: Queryset is empty! 
{% endif %}

As Daniel mentioned above you can do also withou if but with empty:

{% for i in queryset %}
    {{ i.text }}  
{% empty %}
    Error: Queryset is empty! 
{% endfor  %}