Interesting Rails Feature - Active Model Dirty

This feature isn't used nearly as much as it deserves to be.

ActiveRecord objects keep a track of whether any of their attributes values have changed via the ActiveModel::Dirty module.

# Loading an object to memory
user = User.find 29
# changed? lets us know whether any modifications were made to the object
u.changed? # => false
# After Modifying the users name, we can see that changed? now returns a true
u.name = 'Frank'
u.changed? # => true
# changed can be used to let us know which attributes have been modified
u.changed  # ["name"]
# #{attribute_name}_was can be used to obtain the former value
u.name_was # "Joliene"
# #{attribute_name}_change returns an array consisting of the old and new values
u.name_change # ["Joliene", "Frank"]

Next time, when temporarily assigning variables the values of object attributes before modifying them, remember that this functionality is already provided by Rails in an elegant way.