How to get bounds of 'fullscreen' UITableView before content is loaded - objective-c

Question

I've been trying to implement an overlaying activity indicator for a UITableView by this tutorial - http://www.markbetz.net/2010/09/30/ios-diary-showing-an-activity-spinner-over-a-uitableview/
It might be a little old but it seems to work well apart from a little issue with the bounds to display the overlay in.
I try to get those bounds here:
-(void)showActivityView {
if (overlayController == nil) {
// This is where I get the wrong bounds
overlayController = [[ActivityOverlayController alloc] initWithFrame:self.tableView.bounds];
}
[self.tableView insertSubview:overlayController.view aboveSubview:self.tableView];
}
And this gets the bounds and displays my overlay perfectly if I call the method AFTER the table is loaded and filled but if I call it before it gets wrong bounds. I've tried getting the bounds of the tableView.superView but this just displays the overlay in the top left corner.
I understand this is because the UITableView doesn't contain any cells before loading and so doesn't have proper bounds yet but I don't know of a way to get these.
Wrong display:
Correct (but after loading table) display:

Answer 1

How about using the UITableView's "frame" property, rather than "bounds"? If the Table View is defined in a XIB, the frame should already be fine before loading cells into the table. So you would need to replace:
overlayController = [[ActivityOverlayController alloc] initWithFrame:self.tableView.bounds];
with:
overlayController = [[ActivityOverlayController alloc] initWithFrame:self.tableView.frame];

Answer 2

According to the example link you should do
-(void)showActivityView {
if (overlayController == nil) {
// This is where I get the wrong bounds
overlayController = [[ActivityOverlayController alloc] initWithFrame:self.tableView.superview.bounds];
}
[self.tableView.superview insertSubview:overlayController.view aboveSubview:self.tableView];
}
Why are you doing [self.tableView insertSubview:..] instead of [self.tableView.superview insertSubview:..]?