How to manually mark ActiveRecord attribute as dirty

Recently I had quite a conundrum. I was working on a project’s model that was using the ActiveRecord save method update_columns to avoid executing the callbacks on the model, however had the unexpected side-effect further down my stack when a method in the chain checked if a particular attribute changed, wasn’t working because as well as skipping validations and callbacks; it also bypasses the ActiveModel::Dirty logic!

This caused me quite a problem, as I feared that I would be forced to use a method of saving the record that triggered my callbacks (very undesirable).

Fortunately, there is a solution.  Because the ActiveModel::Dirty class is still loaded, you can manually mark with attributes are dirty by simply calling [attr_name]_will_change! before the change to track the attribute.

attribute_name_will_change!

Normally this is all done for you and now later on in the stack when you do something like

if attribute_name_changed?
  was = attribute_name_was
end

It will work, despite using a method to save that doesn’t automatically track the dirty attributes for you.

Actually the ActiveModel::Dirty module has some pretty cool stuff in it. Much of it never gets properly explored in the average Rails project, but it provides some hidden magic, like being able to fully revert an object and undo a save, providing a kind of diff of changes and some other really neat stuff.