How to implement "confirmation" dialog in Jquery UI dialog?

I just had to solve the same problem. The key to getting this to work was that the dialog must be partially initialized in the click event handler for the link you want to use the confirmation functionality with (if you want to use this for more than one link). This is because the target URL for the link must be injected into the event handler for the confirmation button click. I used a CSS class to indicate which links should have the confirmation behavior.

Here's my solution, abstracted away to be suitable for an example.

<div id="dialog" title="Confirmation Required">
  Are you sure about this?
</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
  $(document).ready(function() {
    $("#dialog").dialog({
      autoOpen: false,
      modal: true
    });
  });

  $(".confirmLink").click(function(e) {
    e.preventDefault();
    var targetUrl = $(this).attr("href");

    $("#dialog").dialog({
      buttons : {
        "Confirm" : function() {
          window.location.href = targetUrl;
        },
        "Cancel" : function() {
          $(this).dialog("close");
        }
      }
    });

    $("#dialog").dialog("open");
  });
</script>

<a class="confirmLink" href="http://someLinkWhichRequiresConfirmation.com">Click here</a>
<a class="confirmLink" href="http://anotherSensitiveLink">Or, you could click here</a>

I believe that this would work for you, if you can generate your links with the CSS class (confirmLink, in my example).

Here is a jsfiddle with the code in it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll note that I spent a few minutes on this particular problem and I provided a similar answer to this question, which was also without an accepted answer at the time.

I found the answer by Paul didn't quite work as the way he was setting the options AFTER the dialog was instantiated on the click event were incorrect. Here is my code which was working. I've not tailored it to match Paul's example but it's only a cat's whisker's difference in terms of some elements are named differently. You should be able to work it out. The correction is in the setter of the dialog option for the buttons on the click event.

$(document).ready(function() {

    $("#dialog").dialog({
        modal: true,
        bgiframe: true,
        width: 500,
        height: 200,
        autoOpen: false
    });


    $(".lb").click(function(e) {

        e.preventDefault();
        var theHREF = $(this).attr("href");

        $("#dialog").dialog('option', 'buttons', {
            "Confirm" : function() {
                window.location.href = theHREF;
            },
            "Cancel" : function() {
                $(this).dialog("close");
            }
        });

        $("#dialog").dialog("open");

    });

});

Hope this helps someone else as this post originally got me down the right track I thought I'd better post the correction.