conditionchecked

Conditionchecked is a term used in software engineering to describe a flag or status that records whether a conditional expression has been evaluated. It can be implemented as a boolean field on an object, a local variable in a function, or a marker within a rule engine or workflow.

Overview and purpose: The flag serves to track condition evaluation across processing steps. By marking that a condition has already been checked, systems can avoid re-evaluating the same condition, which is useful for expensive predicates, repetitive loops, or complex decision trees. It is distinct from the actual outcome of the condition; conditionchecked simply indicates that the check occurred.

Applications: Conditionchecking appears in state machines, validation pipelines, data-processing workflows, and event-driven architectures. In a processing loop, a condition may be evaluated once per item, and subsequent logic can reference the conditionchecked flag to decide whether to re-check or to proceed based on the stored result.

Implementation considerations: When introducing a conditionchecked flag, ensure it is thread-safe in concurrent contexts, and define clear rules for initialization and reset. The flag is typically false by default and set to true after the condition has been evaluated. If the underlying state changes, the flag may need to be reset to reflect that the previous evaluation may no longer be valid.

See also: flag, predicate, condition, validation, state machine, idempotence.