How do I open a tab from with jQuery UI Tabs from an link outside of the div?

Question

This may be a little difficult to explain, but I'll try my best. I have a product page with two tabs, full description and video. These are done using jQuery UI Tabs.

Above this section of the page I have a product image with thumbnails...but I want one of the thumbnails to be a link to see the video (which of course is contained in the video tab).

If I load the page as site.com/product#video it does load up the correct tab...but when the tab is not active, and I use a link outside of the #tab div, (ex: Video), it doesn't do anything.

How can I get a link to open the tab if it's not contained in the #tab div?

CODE

This code is outside of the tabs, and needs to open the #video tab

<a href="#video">Open Video Tab</a>

Tabs Code

<div id="tabs" class="ui-tabs ui-widget ui-widget-content ui-corner-all">
<ul class="product-tabs ui-tabs-nav ui-helper-reset ui-helper-clearfix ui-widget-header ui-corner-all">
    <li class="ui-state-default ui-corner-top ui-tabs-selected ui-state-active ui-state-hover"><a href="#description">Full Description</a></li>
    <li class="ui-state-default ui-corner-top"><a href="#video">Video</a></li>
</ul>
<div class="product-collateral">
    <div class="box-collateral box-description">
        <div id="description" class="ui-tabs-panel ui-widget-content ui-corner-bottom">
           Content
        </div>
        <div id="video" class="ui-tabs-panel ui-widget-content ui-corner-bottom ui-tabs-hide">
            <h2 class="video">Video Content</h2>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>
</div>

Answer 1

What worked for me was this:

Html

<a href="#description" class="open-tab">Open Description Tab</a>
<a href="#video" class="open-tab">Open Video Tab</a>   

<div id="tabs">
    <ul>
        <li>
            <a href="#description">Full description</a>
        </li>
        <li>
            <a href="#video">Video content</a>
        </li>
    </ul>

    <div class="product-collateral">
        <div class="box-collateral box-description">
            <div id="description">
                Content
            </div>
            <div id="video">
                <h2 class="video">Video Content</h2>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

Javascript

$(document).ready(function () {
    $('#tabs').tabs();

    $('.open-tab').click(function (event) {
        var tab = $(this).attr('href');
        $('#tabs').tabs('select', tab);
    });
});

So what this does is provide a link to both the description and video tabs, which are selected when the link is clicked.

From here we can see that when selecting a particular tab, we can use either a zero-based index or the href fragment which points to the tab we wish to display.

This is why the href attributes of the a elements match up with the Ids of the div elements - when one is clicked its href fragment is then used to set the selected tab.

---

Update for jQuery UI 1.11

As jQuery UI has evolved, so to has the API for setting the active tab. As of jQuery UI 1.11, the following code will select the active tab:

//Selects by the zero-based index
$('#tabs').tabs("option", "active", index);

Now because we now have to provide a zero-based index, the code I initially provided will no longer work.

What we need now is an index that can actually be used. One approach is:

$('.open-tab').click(function (event) {
    var index = $("selector-of-clicked-tab").index();
    $('#tabs').tabs("option", "active", index);
});

Another is to use HTML5 data- attributes:

<a href="#description" class="open-tab" data-tab-index="0">Open Description Tab</a>
<a href="#video" class="open-tab" data-tab-index="1">Open Video Tab</a>

So you can do this when handling the click of these links:

$('.open-tab').click(function (event) {
    $('#tabs').tabs("option", "active", $(this).data("tab-index"));
});

Answer 2

use jQuery:

$( "#tabs" ).tabs({ active: tabNumber });

Remember, that the indexation starts from 0