The container isn't actually required, it's just a convenience if you're always replacing the same area of the page - like #content.
You can replace different sections of the page per link if you want by putting a selector in the attribute.
<a href="/about" data-pjax="#content">About</a>
how would this be accomplished manually?
Checkout the source, it's a pretty small gem.
git clone https://github.com/nz/pjax-rails.git
Here's a really basic example,
In your action you can render without the page layout if it's requested with the xhr headers.
if request.xhr?
render :layout => false
else
render :layout => 'application'
end
Then client side you'd need something like this to update the url's and fetch the content.
<a href="/about" data-mbjax="#content">About</a>
$(function() {
$('body').on('click', 'a[data-mbjax]', function(event) {
$el = $(event.target)
href = $el.attr('href')
$($el.data('mbjax')).load(href, function() {
history.pushState({}, '', href);
})
})
})
Untested, but something like that would work.
Load the response into an element on the page, update the URL with pushState, only return the content from the server.
