DataProvider for grids

GridView is the widget provided by Yii2 to display data in a grid layout.

This widget requires that data used as an input source is an extension of the abstract class yii\data\BaseDataProvider.

To deal with a data source, DataProvider supplies some additional actions to handle pagination and sorting.

BaseDataProvider has a method named getModels() that returns a list of items for the current page. This means that we could also use DataProvider to paginate data from a source and display it as we need to.

By default, the framework has three core classes that extend yii\data\BaseDataProvider:

• yii\data\ActiveDataProvider

• yii\data\ArrayDataProvider

• yii\data\SqlDataProvider

The first one, ActiveDataProvider, uses a yii\db\Query instance from ActiveRecord as a data source. The parameter array is passed to the constructor and the yii\db\Query object is filled out in the query attribute:

// build an ActiveDataProvider with an empty query and a pagination with 35 items for page...