Laravel: How to verify if model was changed

Question

Is there a simple way for the Eloquent save method to check if a row has actually changed? Something like affected_rows for Eloquent?

The only workaround that I found was from Laravel Eloquent update just if changes have been made to do:

$user = Auth::user();

$timestamp = $user->updated_at;

$user->title = $request->input('title');
....

$user->save();

if($timestamp == $user->updated_at){
   // row was not updated.
}

But is this possible to find this out shorter, without the need of a $timestep variable and the check? I don't want to repeat that logic in every controller.

I am looking for something like this:

$user = Auth::user();

$user->title = $request->input('title');
....

if($user->save()){
   // row was updated.
}

But this does not work since $user->save returns true in both cases. Is there another way?

Answer 1

First of all instead of:

$user->save

you should rather use:

$user->save();

And to verify if anything was changes in latest Laravel you can use:

if ($user->wasChanged()) {
    // do something
}

but be aware this is as far as I remember in Laravel 5.5

Answer 2

You could also skip the save altogether and check if your model ->isDirty(), before calling ->save() at all.

// ...
$user->title = $request->input('title');

if ($user->isDirty()) {
    $user->save();
}

Besides isDirty(), you also have isClean(), and more.

Check out: HasAttributes trait