Rails%203%20In%20Action

268 CHAPTER 10 Tracking state
You have state transition showing in your application neatly, which is great to see. Let’s
commit and push this to GitHub:
git add .
git commit -m "Display a comment's state transition"
git push
Currently, your styles aren’t distinguishable. Look at figure 10.14, and gaze upon their
ugliness.
You could distinguish them by using the colors
you’ve specified in the attributes. Earlier, you
wrapped the state name in a special div that will
allow you to style these elements, based on the
class. For the New state, the HTML for the div Figure 10.14 The unescaped states
looks like this:
New
The state_new part of this you can use to apply the colors from the record to this element.
To do this, you put a style tag at the top of your application’s layout and
dynamically define some CSS that will apply the colors.
10.3.6 Styling states
The states in your system can change at any point in time in the future, and so you
can’t have set styles in public/stylesheets/application.css for them. To get around this
little problem, put a style tag in your app/views/layouts/application.html.erb file,
which will contain some ERB code to output the styles for the states. Directly underneath
the stylesheet_link_tag line, put this code:
.state_ {
background: ;
color: ;
}
You need to define the @states variable in a place that will be accessible in all views of
your application. This means you can’t define it inside any controller other than
ApplicationController. Lucky for you, this is like a normal controller, and you can use
a before_filter to load the states. Underneath the class definition for Application-
Controller, you can add this before_filter:
before_filter :find_states
Now you define the method under the authorize_admin! definition: