limit doesn't work with ActiveRecord - php

Question

I have some problems with the limit using active record.
I've created a dataProvider with a limit of 5:
$dataProvider = new ActiveDataProvider([
'query' => Devicesdb::find()
->joinWith('score')
->where('devices.devicetype = :deviceType', [':deviceType' => $device])
->orderBy(['score' => SORT_DESC])
->limit(5),
'totalCount' => 5,
]);
And this is the resultant query in debug panel:
SELECT `devicesdb`.*
FROM `devicesdb`
LEFT JOIN `devices`
ON `devicesdb`.`id` = `devices`.`id`
WHERE devices.devicetype = 'phone'
ORDER BY `score`
DESC LIMIT 20
The query is fine , and retourns me the data as I want, but I only want 5 items, not 20.

Answer 1

First of all totalCount is a property of Pagination, not ActiveDataProvider. You need to nest it inside of a pagination configurational array. But this is not how you achieve this.
Because you don't want the pagination to appear you can disable it by passing false and now limit will be taken from query (otherwise it's ignored and calculated differently, you can see this related question):
$dataProvider = new ActiveDataProvider([
'query' => Devicesdb::find()
->joinWith('score')
->where('devices.devicetype = :deviceType', [':deviceType' => $device])
->orderBy(['score' => SORT_DESC])
->limit(5),
'pagination' => false,
]);
]);
One more thing - you don't have to write params manually, see this question for explanation and better understanding. So where part of the query can be reduced to just:
->where(['devices.devicetype' => $device])
Also I recommend to refactor model name to just Device and use this to resolve duplicate names conflicts (if any) in SQL query:
->where(Device::tableName() . 'devicetype' => $device])
That way if this model related table name will changed in the future, you don't have to refactor your code.