processitem

A processitem (often written as process item or work item) is a unit of work or data that is designated for processing by a system. The term is used across domains such as software engineering, workflow management, and manufacturing to describe an indivisible piece of work that progresses through a defined processing pipeline. In software, a processitem typically represents a discrete task with a unique identifier that can be queued, processed, and tracked. In manufacturing or business processes, it may denote a component or job that passes through one or more processing steps.

Common attributes of a processitem include an identifier, a payload or content to be processed, status indicators (such as pending, in progress, completed, or failed), timestamps, and metadata such as priority or retry count. Many implementations include fields for dependency information, allowing a processitem to wait for other items to complete before processing begins. Persistence is often employed to ensure durability and allow recovery after errors or restarts.

Lifecycle and processing behavior vary by system but share core stages: creation, queuing, execution, and finalization. A processitem may be retried on failure, moved to a dead-letter store after exceeding retry limits, or cancelled if no longer needed. In distributed systems, processitems enable parallelism and fault tolerance by decoupling task creation from execution.

Related concepts include work item, task, job, queue, and workflow item. The term emphasizes the unit of work entering a processing system rather than the processing logic itself.