laravel 5 - paginate total() of a query with distinct - pagination

Question

I have a query to get photos according to values in a pivot table, that stores the relation of "pics" and "tags":
#photos
$q = PicTag::select(DB::raw('distinct(pics.id)'),
'pics.url',
'pics.titel',
'pics.hits',
'pics.created_at',
'users.username',
'users.displayname')
->leftJoin('pics', 'pics.id', '=', 'pic_tag.pic_id')
->leftJoin('users','users.id','=','pics.user_id')
->whereIn('pic_tag.tag_id', $tagids);
if($cat)
$q->where('typ',$cat);
if($year)
$q->where('jahrprod',$year);
$pics = $q->orderBy('pics.id','desc')
->paginate(30);
The problem is, when for a certain photo multiple (same) tags are stored like "Tag", "tag" and "tAG". Then the same photo would be shown 3 times in my gallery. That is why I use the distinct in the query.
Then the gallery is ok, but $pics->total() does not show "87 photos" but for example "90 photos", because the distinct is not used in the pagination. In laravel 4, I used groupBy('pics.id'), but this did not seem to be the fastest query and with laravel 5 it gives me a total() count result of 1.
How could I get the right total() value?

Answer 1

I know it's an old subject but it could help some other people.
I faced the same problem and the only good solution (low memory cost) I found was to do the request in two times:
$ids = DB::table('foo')
->selectRaw('foo.id')
->distinct()
->pluck('foo.id');
$results = $query = DB::table('foo')
->selectRaw('foo.id')
->whereIn('foo.id', $ids)
->paginate();
I tried this with 100k results, and had no problem at all.

Answer 2

Laravel has issue in paginate of complex queries. so you should handle them manually . In laravel 5 I did it in 2 steps :
Step 1: repository method :
public function getByPage($page = 1, $limit = 10 , $provinceId , $cityId , $expertiseId)
{
$array = ['users.deleted' => false];
$array["users.approved"] = true;
$array["users.is_confirmed"] = true;
if($provinceId)
$array["users.province_FK"] = $provinceId;
if($cityId)
$array["users.city_FK"] = $cityId;
if($expertiseId)
$array["ONJNCT_USERS_EXPERTISE.expertise_FK"] = $expertiseId;
$results = new \stdClass();
$results->page = $page;
$results->limit = $limit;
$results->totalItems = 0;
$results->items = array();
$users= DB::table('users')
->distinct()
->select('users.*','ONDEGREES.name as drgree_name')
->join('ONJNCT_USERS_EXPERTISE', 'users.id', '=', 'ONJNCT_USERS_EXPERTISE.user_FK')
->join('ONDEGREES', 'users.degree_FK', '=', 'ONDEGREES.id')
->where($array)
->skip($limit * ($page - 1))->take($limit)->get();
//$users = $usersQuery>skip($limit * ($page - 1))->take($limit)->get();
$usersCount= DB::table('users')
->select('users.*','ONDEGREES.name as drgree_name')
->join('ONJNCT_USERS_EXPERTISE', 'users.id', '=', 'ONJNCT_USERS_EXPERTISE.user_FK')
->join('ONDEGREES', 'users.degree_FK', '=', 'ONDEGREES.id')
->where($array)
->count(DB::raw('DISTINCT users.id'));
$results->totalItems = $usersCount;
$results->items = $users;
return $results;
}
Step 2:
In my Search Controller :
function search($provinceId , $cityId , $expertiseId){
$page = Input::get('page', 1);
$data = $this->userService->getByPage($page, 1 , $provinceId ,$cityId , $expertiseId);
$users = new LengthAwarePaginator($data->items, $data->totalItems, 1 , Paginator::resolveCurrentPage(),['path' => Paginator::resolveCurrentPath()]);
return View::make('guest.search.searchResult')->with('users' ,$users);
}
It worked for me well!