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Replace jQuery ajax calls with Axios

Background

With our effort towards replacing all ajax calls with Axios as seen in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/39727 and our effort towards upgrading jQuery to 3.0 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/33888.

Recommendation

I recommend that we first replace all jQuery ajax calls with Axios separately before we continue the migration work for upgrading jQuery to 3.0. We should do this separately because the jQuery migration has a few breaking changes related to ajax that are more difficult to test. By transitioning over to Axios, we will save more time in the long run, since we no longer have to test these jQuery migration changes related to ajax and we are helping with the transition towards replacing all ajax calls with Axios.

jQuery 3.0 ajax changes

Ajax

  • Breaking change: Special-case Deferred methods removed from jQuery.ajax
  • Breaking change: Cross-domain script requests must be declared
  • Breaking change: Hash in a URL is preserved in a jQuery.ajax() call
  • Feature: New signature for jQuery.get() AND jQuery.post()

Tentative Plan

  1. Go through each occurrence in CE and fix it
  2. Create MR to fix CE and EE at the same time
  3. After all CE occurrences are fixed, create EE MRs to fix EE only occurrrences

Estimated level of effort

CE

  • 86 occurrences of $.ajax according to git grep -w $.ajax | wc -l
  • 4 occurrences of $.post according to git grep -w $.post | wc -l
  • 12 occurrences of $.get according to git grep -w $.get | wc -l

EE

  • 100 occurrences of $.ajax according to git grep -w $.ajax | wc -l
  • 4 occurrences of $.post according to git grep -w $.post | wc -l
  • 12 occurrences of $.get according to git grep -w $.get | wc -l

Files impacted (CE)

Generated using git grep -c -w $.ajax

$.ajax

$.post

$.get

EE

$.ajax

$.post

$.getJSON

Edited by Clement Ho