Pagination toolbar availability in IDEA 2022.1 Ultimate versus Community edition

The direct answer

The pagination toolbar in the JPA Query Console is an Ultimate-only feature. IntelliJ IDEA 2022.1 Community does not ship JPA/Hibernate support at all — the persistence facet, the Query Console, and its pagination UI are part of the paid Jakarta EE/JPA tooling. No setting or driver choice will make the toolbar appear in Community; the only routes are manual pagination clauses or a third-party plugin. This edition split is well established, but note that exact console rendering details can shift between 2022.x patches, so treat the behavior notes below as 2022.1-era and verify on your build.

Does the toolbar adapt when setMaxResults is a runtime variable?

Partially, and this is where uncertainty lives. With a literal constant (e.g. setMaxResults(20)), Ultimate's console can analyze the query statically and render page boundaries confidently. When the limit is bound to a parameter (:maxResults), the toolbar still renders, but the page count it shows depends on what the JDBC driver reports back. Drivers that don't propagate result-set metadata cleanly can leave the console showing boundaries that don't match what a standalone client (psql, mysql CLI, DBeaver) returns for the same query. This is a driver-behavior issue, not an edition issue — the same mismatch would appear in any tool relying on that metadata.

Community versus Ultimate workflow

• Ultimate: the console parses the query, surfaces first/max-result controls, and lets you page without editing the JPQL.
• Community: you write setFirstResult/setMaxResults (or native LIMIT/OFFSET) yourself, typically in a plain SQL console or test code. Nothing is auto-generated, so any discrepancy between console row count and real cardinality is yours to debug — usually it traces to the driver silently ignoring a hint.

Can setMaxResults exceed the result-set size?

Yes, safely. JPA providers and JDBC drivers treat the limit as a ceiling, not an exact fetch requirement: asking for 500 rows from a 12-row result returns 12 rows with no error and no padding. The console behaves the same way.

How to verify on your setup

1. In Ultimate, run a query with a literal setMaxResults(20) and confirm the toolbar appears and caps displayed rows.
2. Re-run with :maxResults bound at runtime, then compare the console's row count against the same query in a standalone client. A mismatch points at your driver's metadata handling, not the IDE.
3. Set the limit far above the table size and confirm all rows return without error.

If you see a row-count discrepancy, the one detail that changes the recommendation is which JDBC driver and version you're using — some older drivers ignore max-results hints entirely, in which case pagination must be pushed into the query text itself.