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Improve backend domain model of CI/CD variables

Description

Our backend model of CI/CD variables has become more complex recently. It accumulated some technical debt, and despite spending some time on refactorings there is still some room for improvement.

We recently added bridge jobs and we need to share some variables between a bridge job and a build job. We are using inheritance via mixins, however we could benefit from using composition here.

We also do have some inconsistent naming, described below, in the "old description". We do have a few other issues about technical debt related to variables, and we could benefit from doing a few more refactorings in this area.

Old descritpion

After we've done https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32568 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12729, we also want to refactor Ci::Variable to Ci::ProjectVariable. Because Ci::Variable or variable was meant to be a project thing, but new kinds of variables will be added soon.

Old Plan

We do

  • Refactor the domain name from Ci::Variable to Ci::ProjectVariable
  • Refactor variable to project_variable in codebase
  • Refactor factory from factory :ci_variable to factory :ci_project_variable
  • those changes have been included in a Backend MR of Group-wide secret variable, so we'll decouple the change to a new MR

We don't

  • Rename table from ci_variables to ci_project_variables

Proposal

Refactor in all codebase (function/tests/doc)

Links / references

Edited by Grzegorz Bizon