Fullcalendar not rendering inside Magento block - php

Question

I have a custom block within Magento Community which rewrites the Orders Tab in Adminhtml and replaces it with a Fullcalendar(arshaw.com's one) which displays events for when products are to be shipped.
I have implemented a JSON feed which relies on my custom modules controller to populate and save the data. This works beautifully and I can see the products once I click on Month / Today / Prev / Next. However, this is not how it should work. It should render when the page loads, except all I see are the buttons.
I have tried referencing the tab in javascript which it is in eg.
jQuery('#diagram_tab_orders_content').tabs({
show: function(event, ui) {
jQuery('#dashCalendar').fullCalendar('render');
}
Where #dashCalendar is the id / class of my tag.
Except this does not render the calendar. It does nothing but change the CSS of diagram_tab_orders_content.
I've seen a similar topic on Stackoverflow where you must explicitly reference the tab where the calendar is in order for it to render properly. This is what I'm trying to achieve in order for the calendar to render when the document is ready.
Any suggestions on how to make this calendar render when the document is ready would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

So I've figured out the issue with the calendar and it pertains to the tabs within Magento. Referencing the tabs explicitly within Javascript causes issues with the rendering, thus I had to rewrite the Dashboard block.
Config.xml in my ModuleName/etc folder:
<global>
<!-- Blocks -->
<blocks>
<adminhtml>
<rewrite>
<dashboard>ModuleName_Block_Adminhtml_Calendar</dashboard>
</rewrite>
</adminhtml>
</blocks>
</global>
Then within my ModuleName/Block/Calendar.php file I set the template:
public function __construct()
{ //this creates the template block for the calendar
parent::__construct();
$this->setId('Calendar');
$this->setTemplate('moduleName/calendar/calendar.phtml');
}
Copy/Paste the fullcalendar's JSON Example page provided, set your events: tag to your .php file which generates / requests data from your database using JSON. Customise your Theme if you want using the provided CSS and you will see the calendar render with the events when you log into your Adminhtml. Below you will see 'Populate'. Its an action within my Controller which retrieves the data and echo's out a JSON feed to the Calendar.
events: {
url: "<? echo $this->getUrl('moduleName/adminhtml_calendar/populate') ?>"
},
Now the Calendar renders with events properly.