Programming Social Applications

Getting and Setting Information About the TabSet

In the previous examples, we explored a rich layer of customization for building tabs. In addition to this functionality, OpenSocial defines many helper methods for obtaining and setting information about the current TabSet. You can think of a TabSet as a container for one or more tabs, whereas a tab is just a single piece of the whole set. These helper methods enable you to vastly extend your tab functionality.

The examples that follow assume that you have already created this TabSet object:

var tabs = new gadgets.TabSet();

Aligning tabs

Should you need to align the tabs to a different horizontal position on the TabSet, you can use the alignTabs(...) method. The first parameter is the string position (left, right, or center), and the second optional parameter is the numeric offset from that position (in pixels):

tabs.alignTabs("right", 50);

Showing and hiding tabs

The displayTabs() method allows you to show or hide the TabSet tabs. The only parameter is a Boolean that specifies whether you want the tabs displayed (true) or not (false):

tabs.displayTabs(false);

Obtaining the parent container

To obtain the parent container of the TabSet, use the getHeaderContainer() method. This method returns the HTML element containing the TabSet:

var headerContainer = tabs.getHeaderContainer();

Obtaining the currently selected tab

To get the currently selected tab, you can use the getSelectedTab() method. This method returns an OpenSocial tab object, from which ...