Thanks for that DotNetNuke.Common.Globals.NavigateURL, I finally got off my lazy butt and figured out how it worked. I found a webpage that gave me the clue to do what I needed:

http://blog.tungstentech.com/CategoryView,category,DotNetNuke%20Development.aspx

I needed this for *client side* use in javascript and I also wanted to use the *TabName* so that I could move it from development to production without having to worry about different TabIDs, so in my page_load method, I had the following:

using System;
using System.Collections;

public partial class DesktopModules_RoutesList_RoutesList : DotNetNuke.Entities.Modules.PortalModuleBase
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) {
        ArrayList list = this.PortalSettings.DesktopTabs;
        int TruckTabID = 0;

        foreach (Object theitem in list) {
            DotNetNuke.Entities.Tabs.TabInfo theTab = (DotNetNuke.Entities.Tabs.TabInfo)(theitem);
            if (theTab.TabName == "Truck") {
                TruckTabID = theTab.TabID;
                break;
            }
        }
        string TruckURL = DotNetNuke.Common.Globals.NavigateURL(TruckTabID);
        litTruckURL.Text = "<input type=\"hidden\" id=\"TruckURL\" value=\"" + TruckURL + "\"/>";
    }
}

and on the webpage, I had:

<asp:Literal runat="server" ID="litTruckURL"/>

this allowed me to imbed the URL into javascript like this:

YAHOO.widget.DataTable.formatLink = function(elCell, oRecord, oColumn, oData) {
            elCell.innerHTML = '<a href="' + document.getElementById('TruckURL').value + '?jobID=' + oRecord.getData("jobID") + '">' + oData + '</a>';
};

and everytnhing is working well.

once again, thanks.

Nick