Working with a selected tab

Working with a selected tab


My apologies if this has been covered elsewhere but I've not been able
to locate an answer..
I have a set of tabs that are working well. The first tab represents
a header record and the remaining tabs represent details associated
with the header. The tab contents are filled via jquery ajax and all
it good.
Elsewhere on the page I would like to click a link and have the
response vary based on the selected tab. Specifically, I'd like the
dom_id of the selected tab. How can I pick that out from the tabs
collection?