Feature Request: Track habtm changes

rubyonrails-core
1

Hey guys,

What do you think about tracking habtm changes?

Apparently we can’t do that because when you change a habtm association it is changed immediately on database instead of waiting the save call (not sure why and the problem may not be because of that).

Current behaviour:

profile.roles_ids

=>

profile.update_attributes(:name => nil, :roles_ids => […])

=> false

profile.changes

{ “name” => [‘Admin’, nil] }

Expected behaviour:

profile.roles_ids

=>

profile.update_attributes(:name => nil, :roles_ids => […])

=> false

profile.changes

{ “name” => [‘Admin’, nil], :roles_ids => [, […]] }

Giving some problem context, I have an application that need to audit almost every change and I can track everything using the changes method but habtm changes.

We can write a solution like storing the initial state of roles_ids in an after_initialize callback on the model and comparing it on a after_save but I was thinking in a more “native” solution.

What do you think?

2

Not sure about how it will impact the application but this is the first shot: https://gist.github.com/sobrinho/6309391

3

Some quick thoughts:

  • using the _ids= method on has_many doesn’t show up in changes either

  • this could get really expensive if you have a lot of rows on the other end of the HABTM, since you cache the complete list of IDs in memory

–Matt Jones