jQuery Mobile Navigation Tabs

Question

I want to have a tab-navigation in my jQuery Mobile project. I know I can use the data-role 'navbar' but I only want to change the content below that navbar without swiping to a new page. So far I could only have several different pages with the same navbar linking to each other but that's not what I want.

Can anyone help me?

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

You can use the jQuery Mobile navbar styling but use your own click-handler so instead of changing pages the click will just hide/show the proper content on the same page.

HTML

<div data-role="navbar">
    <ul>
        <li><a href="#" data-href="a">One</a></li>
        <li><a href="#" data-href="b">Two</a></li>
    </ul>
</div><!-- /navbar -->
<div class="content_div">onLoad Content</div>
<div id="a" class="content_div">Some 'A' Content</div>
<div id="b" class="content_div">Some 'B' Content</div>

JAVASCRIPT

$(document).delegate('[data-role="navbar"] a', 'click', function () {
    $(this).addClass('ui-btn-active');
    $('.content_div').hide();
    $('#' + $(this).attr('data-href')).show();
    return false;//stop default behavior of link
});

CSS

.content_div {
    display: none;
}
.content_div:first-child {
    display: block;
}

Here is a jsfiddle of the above code: http://jsfiddle.net/3RJuX/

NOTE:

• Each of the links in the navbar have a "data-href" attribute set to the id of the div (or whatever container you want to use) that will be displayed.

Update

After 1 year I came back to this answer and noticed that the delegated event handler selector can be optimized a bit to utilize a class rather than an attribute (which is a lot faster of a lookup):

$(document).delegate('.ui-navbar a', 'click', function () {
    $(this).addClass('ui-btn-active');
    $('.content_div').hide();
    $('#' + $(this).attr('data-href')).show();
});

Update

This code can be made to be more modular by using relative selectors rather than absolute ones (like $('.content_div'), as this will select all matching elements in the DOM rather than just ones relative to the button clicked).

//same selector here
$(document).delegate('.ui-navbar ul li > a', 'click', function () {

    //un-highlight and highlight only the buttons in the same navbar widget
    $(this).closest('.ui-navbar').find('a').removeClass('ui-navbar-btn-active');

    //this bit is the same, you could chain it off of the last call by using two `.end()`s
    $(this).addClass('ui-navbar-btn-active');

    //this starts the same but then only selects the sibling `.content_div` elements to hide rather than all in the DOM
    $('#' + $(this).attr('data-href')).show().siblings('.content_div').hide();
});​

This allows you to nest tabs and/or have multiple sets of tabs on a pages or pseudo-pages.

Some documentation for the "relative selectors" used:

• .closest() : http://api.jquery.com/closest
• .siblings() : http://api.jquery.com/siblings

Here was an example: http://jsfiddle.net/Cfbjv/25/ (It's offline now)