Rails AR readonly!

ActiveRecord has some readonly features that marks a model (or relation) not to be updated. This way if we try:

irb> user = User.last
=> #<User id: 123, ...>

irb> user.readonly!
=> true

irb> user.update(updated_at: Time.current)
   (0.3ms)  SAVEPOINT active_record_1
   (0.3ms)  ROLLBACK TO SAVEPOINT active_record_1
ActiveRecord::ReadOnlyRecord: User is marked as readonly

Then we get a rollback with the readonly error.

An interesting thing is that the touch AR method does not respect this readonly feature (I tested on rails 6.0.4.1), check this out:

irb> user = User.last
=> #<User id: 123, ...>

irb> user.readonly!
=> true

irb> user.touch
   (0.3ms)  SAVEPOINT active_record_1
  User Update (1.4ms)  UPDATE "users" SET "updated_at" = $1 WHERE "users"."id" = $2  [["updated_at", "2022-03-08 20:39:40.750728"], ["id", 123]]
   (0.2ms)  RELEASE SAVEPOINT active_record_1
=> true