What does it mean to hydrate and dehydrate a Laravel Livewire component?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.