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[default branch protection] write to the new jsonb settings column from existing API

Background Context

Currently, the options for default branch protection at the instance and group level lag behind, and are not as fin grained, as the options available from the Protected Branches feature

The branch defaults lag behind because the current implementation uses an integer column to store the default settings, which becomes difficult if not impossible to expand as new options and finer detail controls are added to the protected branches feature

at a high-ish level the existing feature is implemented as:

  1. there are integer columns on the database tables (application level and group level)
  2. these integers are mapped to a subset of protected branch settings
  3. when creating a default branch, those settings are passed into the protected branch service

Proposal

A more detailed proposal can be seen in the epic [here](&10391

At a high level the proposal is to:

  1. use a jsonb column rather than an integer
  2. update the settings API to accept a payload the matches the protected branches API
  3. Pass those settings into the ProtecteBrancheService here

This issue

In #408150 (closed), we added a new jsonb column that will eventually be used to store the default branch protection settings.

Eventually, the API will be updated to allow updating of the column directly (#408151 (closed)) and the existing default_branch_protection API will need to be deprecated

Before that time comes, we want to update the existing default_branch_protection API implementation to update the new jsonb column in addition to the column it is already writing to.

This is prep work to make the switch from using the existing implementation to the new column as seamless to the end-user as we can when the time comes, and prevents us from having null values in that column.

Alternatively, we could skip this work and at read-time do some logic such as:

  • if new jsonb column is null, fall back to the original default_branch_protection logic
Edited by Michael Becker