Select2 response fail

Not '%LIKE%', just 'LIKE' the wildcard wrap the search term, not the operator.

Also, you are not returning any of the Paginator data in the response, so there is no way for the additional requests to fire - there is no data.total to evaluate if there are more results! You would need to replace the Paginator's items - you could return the result of $companies->hasMorePages() in the response, or replace the items in the Paginator with the $formatted contents using setItems()

Is there a better way to do what I am trying to do?

What you are doing is perfectly fine in my opinion... you simply need to given select2 the data it needs.

@tykus Thank you for you help. I went back to basics and read through the select2 documentation and used your hints .

CONTROLLER

public function selectcompany(Request $request)
    {
        $term = trim($request->q);
        if (empty($term)) {
            return response()->json();
        }
        $companies = Company::where('CompanyName', 'LIKE', '%'.$term.'%')->orderby('CompanyName')->paginate();
        $morePages = $companies->hasMorePages();
        $formatted = [];
        foreach ($companies as $company) {
            $formatted[] = ['id' => $company->ID, 'text' => $company->CompanyName];
        }
        $results = array(
            "results" => $formatted,
            "pagination" => array(
                "more" => $morePages
            )
        );
        return response()->json($results);
    }

SCRIPT

 <script>
      $(document).ready(function() {
          $('#companyid').select2({
              placeholder: "Search for a company...",
              minimumInputLength: 3,
              ajax : {
                  url : '/api/selectcompany',
                  dataType : 'json',
                  delay : 250,
                  data : function(params){
                      return {
                          q : params.term,
                          page : params.page
                      };
                  },
                  processResults : function(data, params){
                      params.page = params.page || 1;
                      return {
                          results : data.results,
                          pagination: {
                              more : data.pagination.more
                          }
                      };
                  }
              }
          });
      });
  </script>