Best Practices for No Results from Database Query?

[eluser]kirkaracha[/eluser]
What's the best way to report that a database query doesn't return any results? I've been checking $query->num_rows() in my controllers, setting a message if there aren't any results, and loading a view to display the message. That makes for a lot of redundant code in my controllers. Is there a better/more efficient way of handling this, maybe in MY_Controller or MY_Model?