Larvel 9 pagination with limit - php

Question

Working inside a Laravel 9 project and need to limit my returned results and then paginate, I have over 40,000 total rows and would like to show no more than 500 entries as a paginated list.
When I add limit to my query it's still returning all my rows and isn't limiting, what am I missing?
$query = Application::query();
$query = $query->with(['payday', 'response', 'apiLinks']);
if ($request->input('filters.from')) {
$query->where('created_at', '>=', Carbon::parse($request->input('filters.from')));
}
if ($request->input('filters.to')) {
$query->where('created_at', '<=', Carbon::parse($request->input('filters.to')));
}
if ($request->input('search')) {
foreach ($request->input('search') as $field => $value) {
$query->where($this->mapSearchField($field), $value);
}
}
$query = $query->limit(500);
$query = $query->paginate(25);
return response()->json([
'applications' => $query ?? []
], 200);

Answer 1

There is no built in solution to limit the maximum number of pages with a LengthAwarePaginator
You will need to instantiate it yourself.
$query = Application::query();
$query = $query->with(['payday', 'response', 'apiLinks']);
if ($request->input('filters.from')) {
$query->where('created_at', '>=', Carbon::parse($request->input('filters.from')));
}
if ($request->input('filters.to')) {
$query->where('created_at', '<=', Carbon::parse($request->input('filters.to')));
}
if ($request->input('search')) {
foreach ($request->input('search') as $field => $value) {
$query->where($this->mapSearchField($field), $value);
}
}
//current page
$page = \Illuminate\Pagination\Paginator::resolveCurrentPage('page');
//total number of element (we force max to 500)
$total = min($query->count(), 500);
//the items for current page (25 is items per page)
$items = $query->forPage($page, 25)->get();
//we instantiate the paginator manually (25 is items per page)
$results = new \Illuminate\Pagination\LengthAwarePaginator($items, $total, 25, $page);
return response()->json([
'applications' => $results
], 200);
Yeah, no out of the box answer for this one.