Bootstrap toggleable tabs without having tab links

Is there a way to do the following

<!-- Nav tabs -->
<ul class="nav nav-tabs" role="tablist">
  <li class="active"><a href="#home" role="tab" data-toggle="tab">Home</a></li>
  <li><a href="#profile" role="tab" data-toggle="tab">Profile</a></li>
  <li><a href="#messages" role="tab" data-toggle="tab">Messages</a></li>
  <li><a href="#settings" role="tab" data-toggle="tab">Settings</a></li>
</ul>

<!-- Tab panes -->
<div class="tab-content">
  <div class="tab-pane active" id="home">...</div>
  <div class="tab-pane" id="profile">...</div>
  <div class="tab-pane" id="messages">...</div>
  <div class="tab-pane" id="settings">...</div>
  <div class="tab-pane" id='extra'> .... </div>

</div>

so there is another tab pane called #extra, but I don't want it to have a link as a tab, but I do want it to be toggleable by some other event

as bootstrap tabs.js works from trigger a tab('show') on a link and not on the pane itself, how do I trigger a tab pane without working on a tab?

note: I aware that the basic operation it does it doing a show() and hide() on the tab pane, but I feel that doing all this manually inhibits me from using callbacks, etc

You could add the tab for extras and then just hide it

Add this to your nav-tabs:

<!-- language: lang-html -->

<li class="hidden"><a href="#extra" role="tab" data-toggle="tab" >Extra</a></li>

Then activate from somewhere else with JavaScript:

<!-- language: lang-js -->

$("#launchExtra").click(function() {
    $('#myTab a[href="#extra"]').tab('show')
});

Working demo in jsFiddle

---

Alternatively, you could just handle the whole thing yourself. The only thing .tab('show') does is remove the active class from all the other nav-tabs and tab-content elements. And then add back the .active class on the appropriate elements.

So first remove all the active elements and then add back the active class:

<!-- language: lang-js -->

$("#launchExtra").click(function() {
    $(".nav-tabs .active, .tab-content .active").removeClass("active");
    $("#extra").addClass("active");
});

Working demo in jsFiddle