RubyZip and MS Office .docx

To create a .docx Word document, you need to zip up a number of files. If you use the rubyzip gem (as seems natural), you'd get a nasty warning:

"Microsoft Office cannot open this file because the .zip archive file
is an unsupported version."

Instead, use the command-line zip command and it works like a charm. See another post describing a similar problem.

attr_accessor and timestamps

I had an attribute set with attr_accessor. Then in a before_update, I would set an actual DB field on certain conditions like so:

def before_update
if ....
  self.my_db_field = self.my_attribute_from_attr_accessor
end

The problem I encountered is that, if the attribute in attr_accessor is the only one that is modified, the updated_at timestamp is not changed...

If you look at the lifecycle of an ActiveRecord update, I think the timestamp update occurs some time BEFORE the before_update...

Too bad! A simple workaround, though, is to put the code above in the validation, as this definitely gets executed before the timestamp update.