Does anyone know of a way to get ActiveRecord to update only the columns which have changed? For example, consider a table foos with columns x,y,z. If I do
f = Foo.find(123) f.update_attributes(:x => 99)
then I want AR to generate
UPDATE foos SET x=99 WHERE id=123
rather than what it currently does:
UPDATE foos SET x=99, y=2, z=3 WHERE id=123
(assuming y=2 and z=3 were the values read in by Foo.find)
Why do I want this? Well, I have tables which are updated asynchronously due to external events, as well as by the user looking at the record in Rails. Both the frontend and the event-handling backend are using ActiveRecord. There are some fields which are updated by the operator, and others which are updated by the backend. But using ActiveRecord, there's a race condition between reading a row and writing it back out again, which means that changes made by the other party may be lost.
I searched for a plugin at http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/search?search=update but couldn't find anything relevant.
So, the options I can think of are:
(1) Bypass ActiveRecord's 'save' and 'update' methods entirely
f = Foo.find(123) ... compare f with params, determine that only 'x' has changed Foo.update_all(['x=?',params[:foo][:x]], ['id=?',123])
But this has to be done consistently everywhere. I guess I can write my own version of update_attributes which does this.
(2) Read each record twice:
f1 = Foo.find(123) ... compare f1 with params, determine that only 'x' has changed f2 = Foo.find(123, :select => 'x') f2.update_attributes(params[:foo])
This seems like unnecessary overhead.
I had a quick look through the code path for 'update_attributes' but it seems to be intimately bound to 'save', and 'save' seems to have no concept of which attributes have changed.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Regards,
Brian.
