Using pagination in Doctrine2/Symfony2 without Doctrine paginator extension

Question

I'm using Doctrine2 for a project that might get a lot of traffic and I'm welling to do some pagination in a search page and that only fetch 5 results per page So is there a good way for doing this without the need to use the doctrine extension and keeping the ORM abstraction layer? I mean I don't want to write any form of dql queries and keep my code in this format:

 $repo= $this->getDoctrine()
                    ->getEntityManager()
                    ->getRepository('AcmeOfficeBundle:Project');
        $list=$repo->findBy(array('PROJ_private' => "0"));

Answer 1

In Doctrine ORM 2.3 you can also utilize Criteria along with matching on the entity repository. Which now (as of 2.5) works with nToMany relationships.

This helps when your query requires another comparison other than equals or when paginating a OneToMany collection of another entity.

$page = (isset($_GET['page']) && $_GET['page'] > 0 ? $_GET['page'] : 1);
$limit = 20;
$offset = ($limit * ($page - 1));
$criteria = \Doctrine\Common\Collections\Criteria::create()
    ->setMaxResults($limit)
    ->setFirstResult($offset);
$expr = $criteria->expr();
$user = $em->getRepository('AcmeOfficeBundle:Project')
    ->matching($criteria->where($expr->gt('PROJ_private', 0)));
$total_records = $user->count();

http://doctrine-orm.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reference/working-with-associations.html#filtering-collections

Answer 2

Doctrine 2.2 ships with a paginator. However, it does require you to write DQL queries.

If you insist on not writing any DQL, you can start by looking at the Doctrine EntityRepository class; specifically, the findBy() method. It has optional parameters for limit and offset, so you can try something like this (using your example as a baseline):

$num_pages = x; // some calculation of what page you're currently on
$repo = $this->getDoctrine()
                ->getRepository('AcmeOfficeBundle:Project');
$list = $repo->findBy(
    array('PROJ_private' => "0"), //search criteria, as usual
    array(/* orderBy criteria if needed, else empty array */),
    5, // limit
    5 * ($num_pages - 1) // offset
);