Using the state_machine gem in one of our Rails apps, which tracks a workflow where items can be received, entered, reviewed, rejected, etc, helped me think thr

Using the state_machine gem in one of our Rails apps, which tracks a workflow where items can be received, entered, reviewed, rejected, etc, helped me think through the business process and map that to our code. We also logged all the changes in state. In hindsight, I should have added a "previous log entry" field to each log item, to make it easier to trace the history of any given item. Like "find all the rejections, hop back one through the log history and show me who created that item." If the rejection references the creation's id, that's easy; otherwise it's a query using widget ids and the date and sorting to get the most recent entry before the rejection.