Once models and controllers grow to a certain size and complexity, it gets tricky to figure out what callbacks act upon them. This is especially true for objects that are several inheritance layers deep, have multiple mixins, were written a long long time ago, or any combination of the above. I've picked up a few tools for crushing nasty little callback buggers that crop up every now and then. I hope you find them useful!
Model validation and save callbacks are provided by the module ActiveRecord::Callbacks. If you read through this code, you'll find that it's built on top of a great little module called ActiveSupport::Callbacks. I'm a big fan of this module because it gives you a nice abstraction to defining callbacks on arbitrary Ruby objects.
The callbacks defined on ActiveRecord::Base sub-classes are
after_find
after_initialize
before_save
after_save
before_create
after_create
before_update
after_update
before_validation
after_validation
before_validation_on_create
after_validation_on_create
before_validation_on_update
after_validation_on_update
before_destroy
after_destroy
To see the list of a particular callbacks, suffix the callback type with '_callback_chain'. For example, to see the 'before_save' callbacks defined on the model Supplier:
Supplier.before_save_callback_chain
This will give you a list of ActiveSupport::Callbacks::Callback objects that have interesting attributes such as identifier, kind, method, and options.
To get a named list of callbacks, do
Supplier.before_save_callback_chain.map(&:method)
To see whether a callback is conditional, check out it's 'options'
Supplier.before_save_callback_chain.first.options
Controller callbacks documentation can be found at ActionController::Filters::ClassMethods.
SuppliersController.filter_chain
Again, the array of filter objects returned by 'filter_chain' are ActiveSupport::Callbacks::Callback instances. This lets you check the method names being called, as well as what options are set on it.
Unrelated to callbacks, but a useful debugging tool to figure out what caused your code to be in it's current context, use Kernel.caller to get a list of filenames and methods of the call stack. It's usually pretty noisy, so I use Enumerable#grep to filter for what I'm interested in.
Kernel.caller.grep /supplier/
The combination of these 3 tips have helped me debug strange callback order bugs, as well as help me learn about a complex model that I've never dealt with before. Unfortunately, I put off writing about this topic for so long that I've forgotten some of the tips. As always, I found reading into the ActiveRecord and ActiveSupport code to be particularly enlightening. If you have some other interesting introspection tips that help you develop, please share them in the comments ;)