Calling onclick rich tab to place cursor in a textfield

My requirement is to place the cursor on a field whenever a rich tab is navigated to. I tried onclick and onlabelclick on the richtab, it doesn't help. I tried using ontabenter, it called my Javascript function below

function placeCurs开发者_JAVA技巧or() {
    jQuery("#send\\:emailAddress").focus();
    return false;
}

however, the cursor is not shown on the field.

If i call the same Javascript function from onclick of the richTabpanel that the tab is under it works and the cursor is placed. However, the onclick is called every time I click inside the tab. So even when I click on the next text field this Javascript is called and my cursor is moved to emailAddress field.

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To debug the first thing you can do is output the length of the jquery query:

console.log(jQuery("#send\\:emailAddress").length)

If the number == 0 then you know the query failed. jQuery does not return null when querying, rather an array-like object + $.fn so that it can execute whether or not it found an element.