The ionic-conference-app solution works.
But: calling nav.setRoot() is not desirable in my case. The only reason I need the tabs is for their ability to pre-load all the pages and keep them in memory (for speed, because initialization of some of these pages is heavy in my app). The nav.setRoot() solution destroys and recreates pages on every tab switch, but that’s what I was trying to avoid by using the tabs and their built-in navigation.
Is there a way to use the two together without calling nav.setRoot() - by just selecting tabs as we used to do with, e.g. app.getComponent('nav-tabs').select(1) ?
Right now using @ViewChild as described here
http://learnangular2.com/viewChild/
does not seem to work - it only works with navcontroller, but no other component - when decorating a property for any other component, the property never gets initialized, it remains undefined.
Any help on how to get to select tabs from the app class methods would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
OK I found a solution that works well for me.