Unexpected pagination behavior

[xanderificnl]

Hi.

Yesterday I ran into an issue where a wildcard kept getting added to my query. During a xdebug session I learnt that cursorPaginate was adding the wildcard and that its function signature included $columns = ['*']. I also searched for issues and found this one, from 3 days ago: #39807

This is the code that resulted in unexpected behaviour:

$articles = $category
    ->articles()
    ->select(['articles.id', 'articles.slug', 'articles.title'])
    ->cursorPaginate(3);

// Result: select articles.id, articles.slug, articles.title, articles.* ... 

I believe the real issue here is that the paginator is causing an undesired result by adding a (wildcard) select. It should only set limit and where/offset and leave the rest to the developer, or query builder.

Is there a (good) reason for the paginator to select columns? If not, I would like to suggest depreciating the $columns parameter in favour of using the query builder.