Ionic - Javascript Tabs

Tabs are a useful pattern for any navigation type or selecting different pages inside your app. The same tabs will appear at the top of the screen for Android devices and at the bottom for IOS devices.

Using Tabs

Tabs can be added to the app by using ion-tabs as a container element and ion-tab as a content element. We will add it to the index.html, but you can add it to any HTML file inside your app. Just be sure not to add it inside the ion-content to avoid CSS issues that comes with it.

index.html Code

<ion-tabs class = "tabs-icon-only">

   <ion-tab title = "Home" icon-on = "ion-ios-filing" 
      icon-off = "ion-ios-filing-outline"></ion-tab>

   <ion-tab title = "About" icon-on = "ion-ios-home" 
      icon-off = "ion-ios-home-outline"></ion-tab>

   <ion-tab title = "Settings" icon-on = "ion-ios-star" 
      icon-off = "ion-ios-star-outline"></ion-tab>

</ion-tabs>

The output will look as shown in the following screenshot.

Ionic Javascript Tabs

There is API available for ion-tab elements. You can add it as attributes as showed in example above where we used title, icon-on and icon-off. The last two are used to differentiate selected tab from the rest of it. If you look at the image above, you can see that first tab is selected. You can check the rest of the attributes in the following table.

Tab Attributes

Attribute Type Details
title string The title of the tab.
href string The link used for tab navigation.
icon string The icon of the tab.
icon-on string The icon of the tab when selected.
icon-off string The icon of the tab when not selected.
badge expression The badge for the tab.
badge-style expression The badge style for the tab.
on-select expression Called when tab is selected
on-deselect expression Called when tab is deselected
hidden expression Used to hide the tab.
disabled expression Used to disable the tab.

Tabs also have its own delegate service for easier control of all the tabs inside the app. It can be injected in the controller and has several methods, which are shown in the following table.

Delegate Methods

Method Parameters Type Details
selectedIndex() / number Returns the index of the selected tab.
$getByHandle(parameter1) handle string Used to connect methods to the particular tab view with the same handle. Handle can be added to ion-tabs by using delegate-handle = "my-handle" attribute. $ionicTabsDelegate.$getByHandle('my-handle').selectedIndex();
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