Admin cookies

The admin panel persists a handful of per-browser UI preferences — table row density, a collection’s filter-chip visibility, your local (unshared) saved views, last-seen row counts for the loading skeleton, the live-preview panel’s open/closed state and split width, and the sidebar’s collapsed state — so a page refresh renders correctly on the very first paint instead of flashing to a default and then snapping to the real value after hydration.

All of it lives in exactly two cookies, both scoped to your project’s basePath (the VexClientConfig.basePath you pass to defineConfig, /admin by default) rather than the whole domain — a public page never sends either cookie, and neither is visible outside the admin panel’s own routes.

vex-admin

One cookie, shared across the whole admin panel for this browser. JSON-encoded:

{
  v: 1,
  density?: "comfortable" | "compact",
  sidebarOpen?: boolean,
  livePreview?: { panelOpen?: boolean; panelSize?: number },
}

• density — the table row density (comfortable/compact), collection-agnostic.
• sidebarOpen — the admin sidebar’s collapsed/expanded state.
• livePreview — the live-preview panel’s state for whichever global you last had it open for. Globals share this one field rather than each getting their own: you only ever view one global’s edit page at a time, so remembering “the last state you left the panel in” is the state worth keeping.

vex-admin:<collection>

One cookie per collection, holding that collection’s own preferences:

{
  v: 1,
  chipsVisible?: boolean,
  localViews?: { viewId: string; name: string }[],
  rowCounts?: Record<string, { n: number; done: boolean }>,
  livePreview?: { panelOpen?: boolean; panelSize?: number },
}

• chipsVisible — whether the filter-chip row under the toolbar is showing.
• localViews — a lightweight index ({ viewId, name } only) of your browser-local saved views, so their tabs render on first paint before localStorage itself has hydrated. The real, full view state lives in localStorage, not here — this index exists purely to avoid a flash of missing tabs.
• rowCounts — the last-settled row count (and whether that was the view’s final page) per view id, read server-side so the <Suspense> loading skeleton renders the right number of placeholder rows and the right footer variant instead of guessing.
• livePreview — this collection’s own live-preview panel open state and split width.

Size bounds

Both cookies stay well under the ~4KB a browser allows for a single cookie (name + value + attributes combined). vex-admin:<collection> is the one that can theoretically grow — a project with many local saved views or many distinct recently-viewed table views — so it’s capped defensively:

1. localViews entry names longer than 40 characters are truncated (not dropped) — a first-paint tab label never needed more than that anyway.
2. If the cookie would still exceed the cap, rowCounts is dropped first (cosmetic only — the skeleton falls back to a pageSize-sized guess).
3. If it’s still too large, the oldest localViews entries are dropped one at a time. A dropped entry’s real, full view still exists in localStorage — only its first-paint tab placeholder disappears, and it’s restored the moment localStorage hydrates client-side.

Migrating from an older version

Before this consolidation, the admin panel wrote up to five separately-named cookies per collection (vex-list-density, vex-list-chips:<collection>, vex-list-views:<collection>, vex-list-rows:<collection>, vex-live-preview-panel:<slug>, vex-live-preview-layout:<slug>) plus the sidebar’s own sidebar_state, all at path=/. The admin shell clears every one of those names on mount, best-effort, the first time a returning browser loads the new version — nothing to do on your end. The cleanup runs in AdminLayout, so it only fires once the admin shell actually mounts — a visitor who only ever views public pages keeps the old path=/ cookies around harmlessly (they’re inert, just unread) until they next open /admin themselves.