return values

New to PHP and Codeigniter, but have experience in the Microsoft world (.NET, MSSQL).

I recently agreed to help a friend with a website. He's more of a design person and doesn't understand the backend/db portion, so I agreed to help him We are using Codeigniter as the framework.

Can someone give me some patterns of how to deal with getting data from a table but not getting any results back?

One of the views deal with a user using dropdowns to search for things in a table. I would like to know when there is no result and maybe give a modal saying that there was nothing it found.

Thanks in advance for your help.