Changing the hash but not moving the page using jquery ui tabs

Question

I added the following code to change the hash to the tab name:

$(\"#tabs > ul\").tabs({ 
select: function(event, ui){ 
window.location.hash = ui.tab.hash;         


        

Answer 1

You could try having a "return false;" after you set the window location but I can't be sure.

Unfortunately, your problems won't end there. There are other issues with navigating back and forth across multiple browsers--nothing may change, page may reload, page state might be mangled, javascript may get reinitialized etc.

You may want to have a look at Tabs v2 which uses the History/Remote plugin though it has not been updated for jQuery 1.3+.

This demo is easier to understand. If you look at the javascript source, you'll notice the use of iframes to handle states.

There is also the History Event plugin and the jHistory plugin to achieve what you want.

Would like to hear back how things turns out and what solution you went with.

Answer 2

If there's an element on the page that has the same id as what you're setting the hash to, for instance you're trying to set the browser hash to #cars and there's already a div#cars on the page, the browser will scroll you down to where that div is.

To my knowledge, there are 3 possible workarounds

1) Change the browser hash to something else such as #thecars.

2) Change your existing markup in some similar manner.

3) On some event, changing the id of your similarly named markup, then changing the browser hash, then rechanging the name of markup back to it's original value should also theoretically work. This is obviously a bad and slow workaround, just thought I'd mention it.

Answer 3

What Chris suggested worked for me, had no clue even a div could link via the #. So my solution is quite simple, in the show: event handler, I do the following, it's not perfect in that back button won't be in history, but that's another job for BBQ history plugin. All my divs simply have id="tab-cars", id="tab-trucks"... strip out the 'tab-' part and put it into the url hash.

var name = ui.panel.id.substr(4);
location.hash = '#'+name;