The cookie table - Consentio

The cookie table is the list of cookies your site sets, shown to a visitor who opens the settings panel: one row per cookie, under the category it belongs to. It is one of three files; the settings file holds how the banner behaves and the language pack holds the words. It is optional, and an empty array [] is a valid start.

List every cookie your site really sets, including Consentio’s own. The table is what a visitor reads before deciding, so a name in it that your site does not set is a false statement about your own site, and a cookie you do set but leave out is the one that matters. Open the browser’s storage inspector on a page where you have accepted everything, and write down what is actually there. The cookie catalogue has rows in this shape for the tools a site commonly runs, to copy in and check against the vendor.

📄 A complete example

A flat array. Each entry is one row.

              [
  {
    "name": "consentio",
    "purpose": "Stores the answer you gave to this banner, so you are not asked again on every page.",
    "provenance": "This site",
    "duration": "90 days",
    "category": "strictly_necessary"
  },
  {
    "name": "_ga",
    "purpose": "Tells Google Analytics one visitor apart from another.",
    "provenance": "Google",
    "duration": "2 years",
    "category": "statistics_performance"
  }
]

            

🍪 The keys of a row

All five are strings. Four are shown to the visitor exactly as written — nothing parses duration or provenance — and the fifth decides where.

Key	What it holds	Shown under
`name`	The cookie’s name as it appears in the browser	`cookieTableHeaderName`
`purpose`	What it is for, in words a visitor can read. It is the column they stop on	`cookieTableHeaderPurpose`
`provenance`	Who sets it — your site, or the name of the third party that does	`cookieTableHeaderProvenance`
`duration`	How long it lasts. `Session` if it goes when the browser closes	`cookieTableHeaderDuration`
`category`	Which of the four categories the row appears under — see below	not shown

The four column headings are words, so they live in the language pack.

📋 How a row finds its category

category is matched, spelled exactly, against one of the four keys: strictly_necessary, preferences_functionality, statistics_performance or marketing_advertising. A row whose category matches nothing is never shown, and nothing says so. The four are fixed, and Settings says why.

🚀 On the HTML route

data-cookies-url on the loader tag names the file — /data/consentio-cookies.json in the install steps, but any address your site serves. Leave the attribute out and the panel shows no table.

🏷️ On the Tag Manager route

The tag’s Cookies Variable field takes any variable that returns the rows. Two kinds do:

A Consentio Tag - Cookies variable — the second template in the release, imported under Variable Templates as the install steps say. It is a table with the same five columns, filled in one row per cookie.
A Custom JavaScript variable returning the array above, function () { return [ ... ]; } — the way to paste rows from the catalogue rather than type them.

Left at None, the panel shows no table.

⚠️ When the file is missing or wrong

No data-cookies-url, or the variable left at None: every category’s table is empty, and nothing is said. That is what “not configured yet” looks like.
The file does not load: the banner does not start, and the console has an initialisation error naming the address.
Every row’s category matches none of the four: the file loaded and the tables are still empty. Troubleshooting is the page for that symptom.

Declaring a cookie does not stop the script that sets it. On the HTML route, Hold a script until consent is how the script waits for the category the row names.