How should I keep track of an elements' state within a window/view?

Question

I am trying to implement a view that contains many elements, whose state change depending on the actions you perform on it. I guess this is something that people often run into so I would like to know what approach works best for you.

What I usually do is define several states for my view: {Loaded,Initialized,...} and then set the state of each element for that state. The thing is even the most trivial event,a click on a button for example, makes the state change, so I need a lot of different states, with many of them containing duplicate information since they are very similar to each other. This seems very repetitive and unefficient but has worked for me up until now, when I need a better way of doing this kind of stuff.

This issue must have been around for quite a while, so it would be nice to know people's tricks & tips, best-practices, and documents of reference.