Spark streaming if(!rdd.partitions.isEmpty) not working

I'm trying to create a dStream from a kafka server and then do some transformations on that stream. I have included a catch for if the stream is empty (if(!rdd.partitions.isEmpty)); however, even when no events are being published to the kafka topic, the else statement is never reached.

val stream = KafkaUtils.createDirectStream[String, String, StringDecoder, StringDecoder](ssc, kafkaParams, topics)

stream.foreachRDD { rdd =>
    if(!rdd.partitions.isEmpty) {

        val message = rdd.map((x$2) => x$2._2).collect().toList.map(parser)

        val val = message(0)

    } else println("empty stream...")

    ssc.start() 
    ssc.awaitTermination()

}

Is there an alternative statement I should use to check if the stream is empty when using KafkaUtils.createDirectStream rather than createStream?

Use RDD.isEmpty instead of RDD.partitions.isEmpty which adds a check to see if the underlying partition actually has elements:

stream.foreachRDD { rdd =>
  if(!rdd.isEmpty) {
    // Stuff
  }
}

The reason RDD.partitions.isEmpty isn't working is that there exists a partition inside the RDD, but that partition itself is empty. But from the view of partitions which is an Array[Partition], it isn't empty.