Rails 3 check if attribute changed

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

if @user.street1 != params[:user][:street1]
  then do something....
end

But that piece of code will be REALLY long. Is there a cleaner way?

Check out ActiveModel::Dirty (available on all models by default). The documentation is really good, but it lets you do things such as:

@user.street1_changed? # => true/false

This is how I solved the problem of checking for changes in multiple attributes.

attrs = ["street1", "street2", "city", "state", "zipcode"]

if (@user.changed & attrs).any?
  then do something....
end

The changed method returns an array of the attributes changed for that object.

Both @user.changed and attrs are arrays so I can get the intersection (see ary & other ary method). The result of the intersection is an array. By calling any? on the array, I get true if there is at least one intersection.

Also very useful, the changed_attributes method returns a hash of the attributes with their original values and the changes returns a hash of the attributes with their original and new values (in an array).

You can check APIDock for which versions supported these methods.

http://apidock.com/rails/ActiveModel/Dirty