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Asked: 2026-05-11T06:40:09+00:00

Almost every programmer did it once in his life: setting some flag if a

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Almost every programmer did it once in his life: setting some flag if a variable’s value changed. There’s always lots of properties and you want to keep track if something changed

  1. in any property
  2. in a specific property
  3. or in some set of properties

I’m interested in different ways to implement the ‘dirty-flag’ functionality for the above situations, besides the standard object wide dirty flag being updated on each property change. There must be something better than putting ‘dirty = true’ in each setter: it just looks ugly and is a tedious work.

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  1. For my DAO I keep a copy of the original values as retrieved from the database. When I send it to be updated, I simply compare the original values with the current. It costs a little in processing but it is a lot better than having a dirty flag per property.

    EDIT to further justify not having a dirty flag: if the property returns to its original value, there is no way to reflect that, the dirty flag continues dirty because the original value was lost.

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