In the context of ORM / Lazy loading of entities, my understanding of the term "Hydration" is as follows:
"Hydrating" describes the process of populating some or all of the previously unpopulated attributes of an entity fetched using lazy loading.
Eg: class Author
is loaded from the database:
@Entity
class Author
{
@Id
long id;
List<Book> books;
}
Initially, the books
collection is not populated.
It is my understanding that the process of loading the books
collection from the database is referred to as "Hydrating" the collection.
Is this definition correct, and is the term common place? Is there another more common term I should be using for this process?