How to get the original value of an attribute in Rails

Question

Hi,

is there a way to get the original value that an ActiveRecord attribute (=the value that was loaded from the database)?

I want something like this in an observer

before_save object
  do_something_with object.original_name
end

The task is to remove the object from a hash table (in fact, move it to another key in the table) upon updating.

Answer 1

Appending "_was" to your attribute will give you the previous value.

Answer 2

ActiveRecord's attributes_before_type_cast method returns a hash of attributes before typecasting and deserialization have occurred.