I’ve previously used jquery-ui tabs extension to load page fragments via ajax, and to conceal or reveal hidden divs within a page. Both of these methods are well documented, and I’ve had no problems there.
Now, however, I want to do something different with tabs. When the user selects a tab, it should reload the page entirely – the reason for this is that the contents of each tabbed section are somewhat expensive to render, so I don’t want to just send them all at once and use the normal method of toggling ‘display:none’ to reveal them.
My plan is to intercept the tabs’ select event, and have that function reload the page with by manipulating document.location.
How, in the select handler, can I get the newly selected tab index and the html LI object it corresponds to?
$('#edit_tabs').tabs( { selected: 2, // which tab to start on when page loads select: function(e, ui) { var t = $(e.target); // alert('data is ' + t.data('load.tabs')); // undef // alert('data is ' + ui.data('load.tabs')); // undef // This gives a numeric index... alert( 'selected is ' + t.data('selected.tabs') ) // ... but it's the index of the PREVIOUSLY selected tab, not the // one the user is now choosing. return true; // eventual goal is: // ... document.location= extract-url-from(something); return false; } }); Is there an attribute of the event or ui object that I can read that will give the index, id, or object of the newly selected tab or the anchor tag within it?
Or is there a better way altogether to use tabs to reload the entire page?
I would take a look at the events for Tabs. The following is taken from the jQuery docs:
Looks like ui.tab is the way to go.