How to select tabs in ionic 2?
<p>I'm struggling to create a basic application in Ionic2 that uses both the side-menu and the tabs navigation. I understand the concepts of the navigation stack and that each tab has its own navigation stack, but I can't grasp the control over the tabs themselves.</p>

<p>The tabs starter template initializes a project with one <code>ion-nav</code> having its rootpage pointing to "rootPage", a property of the <code>@App</code> pointing to a <code>TabsPage</code> class.</p>

<pre><code>&lt;ion-nav id="nav" [root]="rootPage" #content&gt;&lt;/ion-nav&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>The TabsPage class defines 3 properties, one for each page, pointing to their respective classes (each class decorated with <code>@Page</code>). But the TabsPage class itself doesn't seem to have any function, or be injected with a tabs controller and I find little to no documentation on how to acquire a <code>Tabs</code> instance (there are instance methods referenced on <a href="http://ionicframework.com/docs/v2/api/components/tabs/Tabs/">http://ionicframework.com/docs/v2/api/components/tabs/Tabs/</a>)</p>

<p><strong>What I managed to do:</strong>
Use one tab to control the other.</p>

<pre><code>import {Page, Tabs} from 'ionic-angular';

@Page({
    templateUrl: 'build/pages/timeline/timeline.html'
})
export class Timeline {
    tabs:Tabs;
    constructor(tabs:Tabs) {
        this.tabs=tabs;
        this.selectTab(2);
    }
    selectTab(i:number) {
        this.tabs.select(i);
    }
}
</code></pre>

<p>The page above is injected with a Tabs instance, which inherits from NavController. The Tabs instance has the desired <code>select</code> method, and I can point to a different tab (by index, not by name). So in this situation selecting my 'timeline' tab will trigger the constructor, and instead of going to the timeline tab we end up selecting the 2nd tab.</p>

<p><strong>What I would like to do:</strong> navigate to a tab with a link in the side-menu.
My side-menu consists of two ion-items, simple buttons with a click listener. In Ionic 1.x I could use a ui-sref or a href to match a certain state, but in Ionic 2 I can't figure out how to control my tabs.
I can access the <code>ion-nav</code> by giving it an id and using <code>app.getComponent('nav')</code>, but I can not target the ion-tabs this way (hoping it would be bound to a Tabs controller instance).</p>