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Pagination

Doctrine ORM provides two pagination strategies for DQL queries. Both handle the low-level SQL plumbing, but they make different trade-offs:

Feature	Offset `Paginator`	`CursorPaginator`
Total count	Yes	No
Random access to page N	Yes	No
Stable under concurrent inserts/deletes	No	Yes
Performance on deep pages	Degrades (OFFSET scan)	Constant (index range scan)
Requires deterministic ORDER BY	No	Yes

Choose the Offset Paginator when you need a total page count or want to let users jump to an arbitrary page number.

Choose the Cursor Paginator when you need stable, high-performance pagination on large datasets and a simple previous/next navigation is sufficient.

Offset-Based Pagination

Doctrine ORM ships with a Paginator for DQL queries. It has a very simple API and implements the SPL interfaces Countable and IteratorAggregate.

<?phpuse Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Pagination\Paginator;$dql = "SELECT p, c FROM BlogPost p JOIN p.comments c";$query = $entityManager->createQuery($dql)                       ->setFirstResult(0)                       ->setMaxResults(100);$paginator = new Paginator($query, fetchJoinCollection: true);$c = count($paginator);foreach ($paginator as $post) {    echo $post->getHeadline() . "\n";}

Paginating Doctrine queries is not as simple as you might think in the beginning. If you have complex fetch-join scenarios with one-to-many or many-to-many associations using the "default" LIMIT functionality of database vendors is not sufficient to get the correct results.

By default the pagination extension does the following steps to compute the correct result:

Perform a Count query using DISTINCT keyword.
Perform a Limit Subquery with DISTINCT to find all ids of the entity in from on the current page.
Perform a WHERE IN query to get all results for the current page.

This behavior is only necessary if you actually fetch join a to-many collection. You can disable this behavior by setting the fetchJoinCollection argument to false; in that case only 2 instead of the 3 queries described are executed. We hope to automate the detection for this in the future.

fetchJoinCollection argument set to true might affect results if you use aggregations in your query.

By using the Paginator::HINT_ENABLE_DISTINCT you can instruct doctrine that the query to be executed will not produce "duplicate" rows (only to-one relations are joined), thus the SQL limit will work as expected. In this way the DISTINCT keyword will be omitted and can bring important performance improvements.

<?phpuse Doctrine\ORM\Tools\Pagination\Paginator;$dql = "SELECT u, p FROM User u JOIN u.mainPicture p";$query = $entityManager->createQuery($dql)                       ->setHint(Paginator::HINT_ENABLE_DISTINCT, false)                       ->setFirstResult(0)                       ->setMaxResults(100);

Cursor-Based Pagination

Doctrine ORM ships with a CursorPaginator for cursor-based pagination of DQL queries. Unlike offset-based pagination, cursor pagination uses opaque pointers (cursors) derived from the last seen row to fetch the next or previous page. This makes it stable and performant on large datasets — no matter how deep you paginate, the database always uses an index range scan instead of skipping rows.

Cursor pagination requires a deterministic ``ORDER BY`` clause. Every column combination used for sorting must uniquely identify a position in the result set. A common pattern is to sort by a timestamp and then by primary key as a tie-breaker.

Basic Usage

The $cursor parameter is an opaque string produced by a previous call to getNextCursorAsString() or getPreviousCursorAsString(). On the first request it is null or an empty string '' — both are treated identically as the first page. It is typically read from the incoming HTTP query string:

$cursor = $_GET['cursor'] ?? null; // null or '' on the first page

<?phpuse Doctrine\ORM\Tools\CursorPagination\CursorPaginator;$dql = 'SELECT p FROM BlogPost p ORDER BY p.createdAt DESC, p.id DESC';$query = $entityManager->createQuery($dql);$paginator = (new CursorPaginator($query))    ->paginate(cursor: $cursor, limit: 15);foreach ($paginator as $post) {    echo $post->getTitle() . "\n";}echo $paginator->getPreviousCursorAsString(); // previous encoded cursor stringecho $paginator->getNextCursorAsString();     // next encoded cursor string

Navigating Pages

Pass the encoded cursor back on subsequent requests to move forward or backward:

<?php// Next page$paginator->paginate(15, $nextCursor);// Previous page$paginator->paginate(15, $previousCursor);

The cursor is an encoded string containing the location at which the next query should begin fetching results, along with the navigation direction.

API Reference

CursorPaginator::paginate(?string $cursor, int $limit): self: Executes the query and stores the results. Fetches $limit + 1 rows to detect whether a further page exists, then trims the extra row. Returns $this for chaining.
CursorPaginator::getNextCursor(): Cursor: Returns the Cursor object for the next page. Throws a LogicException if there is no next page — call hasNextPage() first.
CursorPaginator::getPreviousCursor(): Cursor: Returns the Cursor object for the previous page. Throws a LogicException if there is no previous page — call hasPreviousPage() first.
CursorPaginator::getNextCursorAsString(): string: Returns the encoded cursor to retrieve the next page. Throws a LogicException if there is no next page — call hasNextPage() first.
CursorPaginator::getPreviousCursorAsString(): string: Returns the encoded cursor to retrieve the previous page. Throws a LogicException if there is no previous page — call hasPreviousPage() first.
CursorPaginator::hasNextPage(): bool: Returns whether a next page is available.
CursorPaginator::hasPreviousPage(): bool: Returns whether a previous page is available.
CursorPaginator::hasToPaginate(): bool: Returns whether either a next or previous page exists (i.e. the result set spans more than one page).
CursorPaginator::getValues(): array: Returns the raw entity array for the current page.
CursorPaginator::getItems(): array: Returns an array of CursorItem objects, each wrapping an entity and its individual Cursor. Useful when you need per-row cursors.
CursorPaginator::getCursorForItem(mixed $item, bool $isNext = true): Cursor: Builds a Cursor pointing at a specific entity. $isNext = true means "start after this item"; false means "start before this item".
CursorPaginator::count(): int: Returns the number of items on the current page (implements Countable).

Next page

SELECT ...FROM   post pWHERE  (p.created_at < :cursor_val_0)   OR  (p.created_at = :cursor_val_0 AND p.id < :cursor_id_1)ORDER  BY p.created_at DESC, p.id DESCLIMIT  16   -- limit + 1

Previous page

SELECT ...FROM   post pWHERE  (p.created_at > :cursor_val_0)   OR  (p.created_at = :cursor_val_0 AND p.id > :cursor_id_1)ORDER  BY p.created_at ASC, p.id ASC   -- reversedLIMIT  16

HTML Template Example

The following example shows how to render a paginated list with previous/next navigation links using the CursorPaginator in a PHP template:

<?phpuse Doctrine\ORM\Tools\CursorPagination\CursorPaginator;$cursor = $_GET['cursor'] ?? null;$query = $entityManager->createQuery('SELECT p FROM BlogPost p ORDER BY p.createdAt DESC, p.id DESC');/** @var CursorPaginator<BlogPost> $paginator */$paginator = (new CursorPaginator($query))    ->paginate(cursor: $cursor, limit: 15);?><p><?= $paginator->count() ?> result(s) on this page.</p><ul>    <?php foreach ($paginator as $post): ?>        <li><?= escape($post->getTitle()) ?></li>    <?php endforeach ?></ul><?php if ($paginator->hasToPaginate()): ?>    <nav>        <?php if ($paginator->hasPreviousPage()): ?>            <a href="?cursor=<?= escape($paginator->getPreviousCursorAsString()) ?>">Previous</a>        <?php endif ?>        <?php if ($paginator->hasNextPage()): ?>            <a href="?cursor=<?= escape($paginator->getNextCursorAsString()) ?>">Next</a>        <?php endif ?>    </nav><?php endif ?>

Cursor Encoding

A cursor is serialized to a URL-safe string via Cursor::encodeToString() and deserialized back via the static Cursor::fromEncodedString(). The format is a JSON object encoded with URL-safe Base64 (no padding):

{    "p.createdAt": "2024-01-15T10:30:00+00:00",    "p.id": 42,    "_isNext": true}

The _isNext flag distinguishes next-page cursors from previous-page cursors. All other keys are the DQL path expressions (alias.field) of the ORDER BY columns, and their values are the database representations of the pivot row's field values.

If you need a different serialization format (e.g. encryption), build it on top of a Cursor instance: call $cursor->toArray() to get the raw data, apply your own encoding, and reconstruct with new Cursor($parameters, $isNext).

Limitations

Every ORDER BY column must map to an entity field. Raw SQL expressions or computed columns in ORDER BY are not supported.
COUNT queries are not available; cursor pagination does not know the total number of results by design. If you need a total count, use the offset-based Paginator described above.
The query must have at least one ORDER BY item; the paginator throws a LogicException otherwise.

Maintained

Unmaintained