Job Status

Description

During the life cycle of a job it can have its status changed a number of times. This document will give you a better understanding of the job status values and when they get assigned.

Status	Description
created	After creating the job
waiting	After being added to the queue
active	Whilst the job is being processed
completed	When the job has been processed successfully
cancelled	If you cancel a job
failed	When the job has failed being processed
terminated	When a job has failed and will not be retried

Job created Status

Before you can process jobs with the Queue object you need to create jobs. Jobs get created by calling the Queue.createJob method. A newly created job will have a status of created and does not exist in the queue database table. The created status is used to prevent invalid queue function calls prior to the job being added to the queue.

Once you have added data to your new job, add it to the queue using Queue.addJob. After the job is added to the queue the created job status will no longer be assigned to this job.

Job waiting Status

After calling Queue.addJob the job status in the database will be set to waiting. A job should not stay at this status for long because it is ready for processing. As soon as a Queue object with a Queue.process handler function is available to process the job it will get assigned the active status.

Once a job gets picked up for processing the waiting status will no longer be assigned to this job.

Job active Status

A job gets a status of active when it is picked up by a Queue object enabled for processing jobs. If you do not add a job handling function to your Queue objects using Queue.process they will never process jobs.

Job processing begins once a Queue object has a job handling function assigned. The Queue object will query the queue database for the next pool of jobs and they will all be assigned an active status. The number of jobs getting processed and marked with the active status depends on the concurrency Queue option.

The active job status can be assigned to a job a number of times if it fails processing and is available for retry. See the Job Retry document for more detail.

Job completed Status

On the successful completion of job processing, jobs will be updated to have a completed status. This is the desired state of all jobs added to the queue. Depending on the removeFinishedJobs Queue option a completed job may be removed from the queue database table.

The completed job status is the end game for any job. Not all jobs will make it this far.

Job cancelled status

A job can get cancelled by one of two processes;

1. Using the Queue.cancelJob method.
2. Passing an error object into the Queue.process next() callback with the error.cancelJob property set.

For whatever reason you want to cancel the job, using one of the above methods will set the job status to cancelled. The job will no longer get processed by the queue and is now dead.

See the Cancel Job document for more detail.

Job failed Status

Depending on the retryMax Job option, a job may get assigned the failed status. This is not all that bad, it means the job still has a life left. See the Job Retry document for more detail.

A failed job can be made active again up to the retryMax number of times. Once this happens it only has two places to go; completed (yay!), or terminated (it will not be back).

Job terminated Status

A job is set to a status of terminated if it fails processing for some reason and has either retryMax set to zero or the retryCount has hit the retryMax value. See the Job Options document for more detail.

This is a bad status for a job to get. It was never successfully processed and is no longer going to get processed.

The terminated status for a job indicates the job has chosen the wrong path in its life and it has come to the ultimate end.