How would I best create navigation that will self-highlight from data-driven criteria?

Consider a portal for an application process. I’m thinking of a left navigation bar that contains components that brings content into the main part of the page (to the right of the navigation) when clicked. Each nav component (or perhaps just the text in it) needs to become a different color based on whether it’s data is in a specific status (submitted=green, unsubmitted=red, new information=yellow, etc). Since it is navigation, it probably also needs to be a different style when it is the selected navigation component as well, of course.

Let’s assume I construct a model that gets the statuses of all of the application elements. I could use the Skuid “Navigation” component to build the navigation tree, but I presume I’d need some CSS trickery and/or code to say “this nav item should be blue if x and yellow if Y”, right? Or is there an easier way? I don’t see how to style individual nav items, not to mention basing it on criteria.

I could instead render based on criteria, but that will get clumsy when there are many navigation elements - I don’t want to create separate navigation items for every status of every element.

Perhaps instead of changing the style of each would it be easier to render an additional component next to the navigation, like a star image, that appears based on criteria? But I don’t see how to make that happen either.

Show me the light!