how do I access a TabControl from within a class?

Question

I'm a week into learning visual basic and I'm completely stuck.

I have a TabControl with 2 TabItems in the XAML of a WPF:

<TabControl Name="browser_tabs" Width="Auto" Height="Auto" BorderThickness="0">

        <TabItem Header="My Page">
            <DockPanel Name="tab1" Width="Auto" Height="Auto" Background="#fefefe" />
        </TabItem>

        <TabItem Header="Browser" Name="browserTab">
            <DockPanel Name="tab2" Width="Auto" Height="Auto" Background="#fefefe" />
        </TabItem>

    </TabControl>

and I am trying to change the tab (programmatically / problematically) from a class, bookmarkControlsObj, within the MainWindow class:

Class MainWindow
    ...

    Public Class bookmarkControlsObj
        Public Sub follow(ByVal url As String)
            browser_tabs.selectedIndex = 1 '<--- ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!'
            web_view2.Load(url)
        End Sub
    End Class

End Class

But I keep getting "Reference to a non-shared member requires an object reference." -- I have no idea how to share the XAML TabControl within the bookmarkControlsObj class.. and it's driving me crazy. Please help.

EDIT:

The reason I have a nested class is because I'm calling the "follow" Sub within the class from a cefsharp (chrome embedded) WebView housing a page with a Javascript function -- using the RegisterJsObject I'm able to call a vb.net method via Javascript. In this case I'm sending a url to the "follow" Sub which loads it in a browser contained in the second TabItem, but I want it to automatically switch to that tab before it loads -- Long story short, RegisterJsObject seems to only work if it is contained within a class.. though it's only nested because that's where it ended up.

I'm able to access the browser in the second tab from the class because I declared it "shared" and added it to the TabItem -- but I'm not sure how to declare the TabControl (set visually) as Shared

Here is a link to the RegisterJSObject if it helps any: https://github.com/ataranto/CefSharp/blob/master/CefSharp/CefSharp.h#L116

Answer 1

"I have no idea how to share the XAML TabControl within the bookmarkControlsObj class.."

Make an overloaded constructor so when you instantiate the bookmarkControlsObj class you can pass in a reference to the Tab control. eg:

Public Class bookmarkControlsObj

Private browser_Tabs As TabControl
Public Sub New bookmarkControlsObj()
 //Default constructor
End Sub

Public Sub New bookmarkControlsObj(ByVal tc As TabControl)
 //Overloaded constructor
 browser_Tabs = tc
End Sub

Calling code:

Dim bookmarkCntrlObj As New bookmarkControlsObj(browser_tabs)
bookmarkCntrlObj.follow("aUrl")