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Could someone point me to a definition of "hydrate" and "dehydrate" as it applies to Livewire components? The only hit in the documentation search refers to

Livewire will take care of hydrating and dehydrating the model between requests with the current, non-persisted data.

In the Lifecycle hooks section, the hydrate and dehydrate class hooks are self referential.

hydrate: Runs on every request after the component is hydrated...

Responses to similar questions have indicated that hydration is filling a object with data after it's been instantiated -- that kinda makes sense, but what would "dehydrating" an object would be?

JohanTux
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2 Answers2

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I don't know if there is a good definition of the lifecycle in the documentation other than the hooks.

I'll explain my understanding of it.

So there are two levels of hydration essentially in Livewire, one is hydrating a component, and the other is hydrating the properties of a component.

Livewire needs to send data back and forth between php and javascript for it to work the way it does. As part of the messages that get sent there is information about the component, and information about the properties. But for the information to be accessible and usable by javascript it needs to be in the right format.

The process of hydration is taking the message and converting its values back into php, creating the Livewire component and creating any of the properties that component has.

Dehydration is the reverse, it goes through all the properties, and serialises them, then it serialises the component and bundles that all into a message that gets sent to the front end.

Dharman
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Josh Hanley
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  • @Dharman sorry I didn't realise putting that at the bottom was a problem! Do you have any guidelines that I can follow for that? – Josh Hanley Dec 29 '20 at 23:56
  • You can find the official guidelines on [meta](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776/should-i-remove-fluff-when-editing-questions?noredirect=1&lq=1) and as well in the [help section](https://stackoverflow.com/help/behavior) – Dharman Dec 30 '20 at 00:09
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Caleb has addressed this very question in a blog entry. The post linked to below is also linked to from the Livewire Docs, though I admit that it is only linked to from a lowly sub-section of the documentation.

I really do think that information like this should be put front-and-centre to lay the groundwork for other people's understanding the framework. Documentation that requires additional foot-notes to gain a full understanding, is by definition, not Documentation, right!?! Anyway, point is, I don't blame anyone for missing it!

Blogpost found here >>

The official explanation isn't actually much different from the answer already accepted (@JoshHanley). Nevertheless, I do find the blog to be clearer and better explained, and might help others in future.

I know that (according to SO guidelines) I'm supposed to re-word the answer as well as link to a resource, but honestly there's no short way of explaining a framework like this. You just gotta jump into the deep end I'm afraid.

cartbeforehorse
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