What to do when paginator is not allowed on a collection? - php

Question

I have two entities: Post (posts) and Tag (tags). They both are in many-to-many relationship. So I have a pivot table called PostTag (post_tag). I want to list all the tags [including a) pivot table and b) post title] which belong to those posts whose author is the logged in user. So I did something like this:
$tags = collect();
$posts = Post::where('user_id', auth()->id())->with('tags')->get();
$posts->each(function($post, $key) use ($tags){
$post->tags->each(function($tag, $key) use ($tags, $post) {
$tag->post_title = $post->title;
$tags->push($tag);
});
});
return $tags;
However, I also need to paginate the result. So I attempted to return this instead:
return $tags->paginate(10);
But paginate is not a method of Collection (Maybe of Builder)
The relationship methods are:
// Post.php
public function tags() {
return $this->belongsToMany(Tag::class)->withPivot('updated_at');
}
// Tag.php
public function posts(){
return $this->belongsToMany(Post::class);
}
I have a feeling that there must be some easier way of doing it which I may not know:
PostTag::someQueryThatFetchesThoseTagsWithPostTitle();
// If I could do something like this, paginate() would have been available

Answer 1

Tags::query()->where('posts.user_id', auth()->id())
->join('post_tag', 'post_tag.tag_id', '=', 'tags.id')
->join('posts', 'post_tag.post_id', '=', 'posts.id')
->selectRaw('tags.*, posts.title as post_title')
->paginate(10);
You can just optimize your query in order to return what you want selecting what you need.
This should be even faster.

Answer 2

You can create your own pagination with LengthAwarePaginator with this piece of code I'm using in my projects sometimes.
//Get current page form url e.g. &page=6
$currentPage = LengthAwarePaginator::resolveCurrentPage();
//Number of results in pagination
$paginate = 10;
//Slice the collection to get the items to display in current page
$currentPageSearchResults = $tags->slice(($currentPage - 1) * $paginate, $paginate)->all();
//Create our paginator and pass it to the view
$paginatedSearchResults = new LengthAwarePaginator($currentPageSearchResults, $tags->count(), $paginate);
Where $paginatedSearchResults returns pagination object.