Update only the object, but not nested attributes?

I have a situation where I only want to update the object, but not the nested attributes. Is there a way to tell Rails to only call update_attributes on the main object? I also have a situation where I only wanted to update certain nested attributes, but not the main object (i.e. one of the subobject attributes of the main object).

Thanks.

Update attributes just calls attributes=, which just calls the setter methods corresponding to the args hash keys. Thus, the way to do what you're looking for is to delete the hash keys you don't want.

But for updating a subrecord instead, you could just call update_attributes on the subrecord instead of the main record.