It was with  jquery-ui-1.10.0 I first started working with jquery tabs. Naturally I came across with this problem of retaining tabs across postbacks.

I started with searching for solutions and I found many but none of them were working for me. Reasons were some of the options were deprecated in this version. I tried with options which are not deprecated but no luck. After some struggle and frustration I managed to get a fix for this and I hope it helps.

 $(function () {

            $("#tabs").tabs(

                {

                    activate: function (event, ui) {

                        var selectedIndex = ui.newTab.index();

                        $('#ContentPlaceHolder1_hdntabindex').val(selectedIndex);

                    }

                });

            $("#tabs").removeClass("ui-widget")

        });

  $(document).ready(function () {

            var s = $('#ContentPlaceHolder1_hdntabindex').val();

            var indexToSelect = parseInt($('#ContentPlaceHolder1_hdntabindex').val());

            $("#tabs").tabs("option", "active", indexToSelect);

        });

This is simple. Capture the selected tab in the activate event. Find more about this event at

http://api.jqueryui.com/tabs/#event-activate

Keep the selected tab index in a hidden variable .This happens only if the tab is changed.

Then in the ‘document.ready’ just use the value in the hidden variable to set the tab index

This is how I managed to retain the tab index.

Author - Pavan (Middlepath Technology Solutions, Bangalore)