How to force a record to save itself even if I have not changed any attributes

Question

In order to clean up some bad data I added a before save callback. Now I need to force all the models to be saved again. However no update operation happens if I do this

User.first.save

How do I force all the models to perform save operation even though I don't have any attributes changed.

Answer 1

You should be able to use touch, it fires callbacks when it saves.

Alternatively turn off partial_updates: ActiveRecord::Base.partial_updates = false

Answer 2

As Josh Rickard commented to the accepted answer, since Rails 3.0.X touch does not invoke validation and callbacks anymore.

You can, however, "touch" it manually with model.update_attribute(:updated_at,Time.now) and skip validation and invoke callbacks that way.