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If you have defined in your model some “actions” / “mutators” in your, beforeSave method there is a simple way to prevent that these actions to take place in certain cases when you need that.
For example, having a Company model and a field, unpaid_invoices_count that you are updating during each saving. If you want that in a certain case, this field not to be updated, instead of saving the model you can use the method setAttributes($array) . Here http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/1.1/CModel#setAttributes-detail you may find details on it.