Inserting 'No items available' message on products summary

[rhysdavies]

I am quite stumped at the moment!  I want to add an if statement to my products summary template to tell the users that there are no items available rather than get a blank page as happens at the moment

I have tried the following statements among others but am not getting anywhere fast.

{if !$entry}
no items message
{/if}


{if !empty ($entry)}
no items message
{else}
Summary Template etc
{/if}

{if $entry == "0"}
no items message
{/if}

Any help gratefully appreciated

[rhysdavies]

I've tried to use

{if $itemcount<0}
no items
{else}

SUMMARY TEMPLATE

{/if}

This works fine by showing the template when there are items to list, but with the categories that have no items, it does not display the message.

I figure that the summary template is not called at all if ther are no products to list, so naturally my message won't show, so is there another way of telling people that there are no products to list rather than give them an empty page?  This site will be handed over to a customer, and I don;t want them to have to activate/deactivate category pages depending on which categories actually have products listed at any one time.

Cheers

[manc]

did any of you find the solution to this?