OFFSET error with symfony project and MS SQL backend - sql-server

Question

I am building a symfony 1.4 project with an MS SQL backend. I built a backend using the admin generator but when I attempt to load an admin module I am getting this error:
OFFSET cannot be used in MS SQL without ORDER BY due to emulation reasons
How do I resolve this?
The symfony application is running on Debian squeeze under Apache 2.2.

Answer 1

In my case the error disappeared by setting the pager size explicit:
list:
max_per_page: 20
Edit: That wasn't the solution, I just had some sorting paramters in the session which solved the problem temporarily.
The new solution is to define a defalut sorting. I did it by overriding the index action:
class organisationActions extends autoOrganisationActions
{
public function executeIndex(sfWebRequest $request)
{
// sorting
if ($request->getParameter('sort', 'created_at') && $this->isValidSortColumn($request->getParameter('sort', 'created_at')))
{
$this->setSort(array($request->getParameter('sort', 'created_at'), $request->getParameter('sort_type')));
}
// pager
if ($request->getParameter('page'))
{
$this->setPage($request->getParameter('page'));
}
$this->pager = $this->getPager();
$this->sort = $this->getSort();
}
}
$request->getParameter('sort', 'created_at')
instead of
$request->getParameter('sort')

Answer 2

Based on my glance at the Doctrine API, it is SUPPOSED to support this feature, but may be broken for some versions of MS SQL. Unfortunately I don't have MS SQL any longer to experiment.
If you can get along without doing paging at all, a workaround could be to disable it by setting
list:
max_per_page: false
in your generator.yml file for the modules using admin.

Answer 3

I just ran into this (or a similar) problem. I was getting that error message, and I narrowed it down to a problem with the paging in Symfony. If I took out the paging stuff from the component action, I could get past it.
The answer turned out to be very simple: just order the main query (i.e. the query that the pager gets applied to). In my case, it was adding this:
->orderBy('i.created_at DESC')
Hope this helps someone.

Answer 4

Just an FYI. The backend admin generator pagination get's stuck on certain pages using OFFSET n; at the end of a doctrine query. The solution is to clear the SESSION COOKIES.
I kept getting blank pages in the backend. I analyzed my mysql queries and saw OFFSET 60 was being added to every query. This happened after I had deleted all records from the database table.