AJAX in Rails 4, HTML5 history API and caching - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm moving a Rails app which loads new views through URLs to a completely AJAX version. The way we're doing this is that loading all views through AJAX and changing the URL through HTML5 History API. We also want to use HTTP caching throughout so that we can cache each partial.
But now we're stuck on one issue. There are now essentially two ways to load each page - through the URL or by clicking on something which loads that partial via AJAX. But this has lead us to create two different views and controllers for essentially loading the same thing - one directly from URL and one by clicking in the main page and loading via AJAX and history API. So how do we ensure that the same view loads from the browser cache when loading directly via URL and with AJAX?
To give an example, GitHub uses in their tree slider. You can access code directly by browsing to it in the window or directly using the URL path for it. I'm sure if the page has been loaded before, they get parts of it from the browser cache.
Is there a way to send requests to the same URL but just render a partial or load the whole page depending on whether the request is sent by clicking on the tab or entered in the address bar? It should use cached partials if they are already there in the browser.
Thanks

Answer 1

If I got it right you want to have different behaviours for the same action, one if the request is get and other one with an ajax request.
You can do it doing this:
mypage_controller.rb
def my_page
...(your logic here)
respond_to do |format|
format.js
format.html
end
end
my_page.js.erb
alert('testing');
.... (further ajax code here)
Here is an article that does this behaviour Rails 4: How to partials & AJAX, dead easy
This way you can have the same action responding for ajax and get request