how to pass data between views/pages in Ruby on rails?

I have a ruby on rails app. I have a view that lists hyperlinks as such, this view is also rendered via same controller/action . when user clicks hyperlinks displayed on this page they go to the same controller/action, with a different id parameter. I want to be able to tell in my controller/view how user gets to these pages, i.e. whether user clicked on one of these hyperlinks vs user came through a different source?

<div id='list'>
  <a href='controller/action/1'> some link 1 </a>
  <a href='controller/action/2'> some link 2 </a>
</div>