An issue I ran into when using the pjax_rails gem, and useful advice if you need additional content delivered besides the yield result.

I ran into this issue and my googlings returned little information, so I PR’d additions to the pjax_rails gem readme, and thought I’d make a post while I’m at it for anyone who runs into this issue in the future.

When you add pjax_rails to your project, it ensures every pjax request does not render your layouts, and only the relevant view. But you may run into the need to include additional content, such as a contextual menu, outside of the particular views.

You can specify a particular layout to render for pjax requests, by overriding the pjax_layout method in your controllers.

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class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  def pjax_layout
    'pjax'
  end
end

And also creating the relevant file app/views/layouts/pjax.html.erb.

You’ll likely want application.html.erb and pjax.html.erb to render the same content, so I recommend moving that content (the data-pjax-container element and its children) into a partial, and then rendering that out in both application.html.erb and pjax.html.erb.

As a tip, I add a h2 title to pjax.html.erb when I want to debug what’s pjax and what’s not.