Determine what attributes were changed in Rails after_save callback?

Question

Rails 5.1+

Use saved_change_to_published?:

class SomeModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  after_update :send_notification_after_change

  def send_notification_after_change
    Notification.send(…) if (saved_change_to_published? && self.published == true)
  end

end

Or if you prefer, saved_change_to_attribute?(:published).

Rails 3–5.1

Warning

This approach works through Rails 5.1 (but is deprecated in 5.1 and has breaking changes in 5.2). You can read about the change in this pull request.

In your after_update filter on the model you can use _changed? accessor. So for example:

class SomeModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  after_update :send_notification_after_change

  def send_notification_after_change
    Notification.send(...) if (self.published_changed? && self.published == true)
  end

end

It just works.

For those who want to know the changes just made in an after_save callback:

Rails 5.1 and greater

model.saved_changes

Rails < 5.1

model.previous_changes

Also see: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel/Dirty.html#method-i-previous_changes

To anyone seeing this later on, as it currently (Aug. 2017) tops google: It is worth mentioning, that this behavior will be altered in Rails 5.2, and has deprecation warnings as of Rails 5.1, as ActiveModel::Dirty changed a bit.

What do I change?

If you're using attribute_changed? method in the after_*-callbacks, you'll see a warning like:

DEPRECATION WARNING: The behavior of attribute_changed? inside of after callbacks will be changing in the next version of Rails. The new return value will reflect the behavior of calling the method after save returned (e.g. the opposite of what it returns now). To maintain the current behavior, use saved_change_to_attribute? instead. (called from some_callback at /PATH_TO/app/models/user.rb:15)

As it mentions, you could fix this easily by replacing the function with saved_change_to_attribute?. So for example, name_changed? becomes saved_change_to_name?.

Likewise, if you're using the attribute_change to get the before-after values, this changes as well and throws the following:

DEPRECATION WARNING: The behavior of attribute_change inside of after callbacks will be changing in the next version of Rails. The new return value will reflect the behavior of calling the method after save returned (e.g. the opposite of what it returns now). To maintain the current behavior, use saved_change_to_attribute instead. (called from some_callback at /PATH_TO/app/models/user.rb:20)

Again, as it mentions, the method changes name to saved_change_to_attribute which returns ["old", "new"]. or use saved_changes, which returns all the changes, and these can be accessed as saved_changes['attribute'].

In case you can do this on before_save instead of after_save, you'll be able to use this:

self.changed

it returns an array of all changed columns in this record.

you can also use:

self.changes

which returns a hash of columns that changed and before and after results as arrays

The "selected" answer didn't work for me. I'm using rails 3.1 with CouchRest::Model (based on Active Model). The _changed? methods don't return true for changed attributes in the after_update hook, only in the before_update hook. I was able to get it to work using the (new?) around_update hook:

class SomeModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  around_update :send_notification_after_change

  def send_notification_after_change
    should_send_it = self.published_changed? && self.published == true

    yield

    Notification.send(...) if should_send_it
  end

end