Rails 3 check if attribute changed

Question

Need to check if a block of attributes has changed before update in Rails 3.

street1, street2, city, state, zipcode

I know I could use something like

Answer 1

ActiveModel::Dirty didn't work for me because the @model.update_attributes() hid the changes. So this is how I detected changes it in an update method in a controller:

def update
  @model = Model.find(params[:id])
  detect_changes

  if @model.update_attributes(params[:model])
    do_stuff if attr_changed?
  end
end

private

def detect_changes
  @changed = []
  @changed << :attr if @model.attr != params[:model][:attr]
end

def attr_changed?
  @changed.include :attr
end

If you're trying to detect a lot of attribute changes it could get messy though. Probably shouldn't do this in a controller, but meh.