Geo: We need an OOP standardized solution to backfill standard/default attributes for old records
Summary
We have some situations where we are doing writing operations to the database in a GET request (which is supposed not to do write operations). This is a bad pattern as it colides with how Geo (#76 (closed)) secondary node expects our routes to work.
I can try to generalize it as:
- We added a new column, but did not backfilled existing records using a migration
- We changed column behavior, but did not migrated existing records using a migration
- We added some cache in the database, but did not backfilled the cached column using a migration
- We are caching data only on first access and saving it to the database
(See related issues below for more meaningful examples)
Related issues / Merge Requests
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1520
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1243
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1217
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1185
- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1708
Possible fixes
We can create a helper to standardize how we handle the backfilling, so we have a single-point in the codebase where we can do some if Gitlab::Geo.secondary? check.
We should have something generic we can use in GitLab CE and change the helper code in EE to include the check, as CE doesn't know about Geo.