All,
We are developing our app with AngularJS and time and again we keep running into the issue of Angular running or loading controllers twice. This becomes a little more intrusive when testing our controllers and more specifically when working with Testacular with jasmine's SpyOn's (since they get triggered before our code runs). So, our question is, is there such a thing as a constructor or init method that Angular is guaranteed to call when instantiating the controllers w/o having to hack work-arounds in the test code? TIA.
If you are specifying the controller in your router, then your template doesn't need to specify the controller via an ng-controller tag. Doing so will double load your controller.
Your controllers shouldn't be loaded twice, unless you are doing something wrong. You shouldn't have to hack any work-arounds.
You might want to provide a concrete example of how you are loading the controllers (and/or the partials which are associated with the controllers). It sounds like you probably have a routing issue which is causing your view to be loaded twice for each request.
Assuming that is a routing-related issue, unless/until you can provide more information to help people to help you, you may want to read this document. Pay particular mention to sections that mention 'redirect' and 'HTML 5' mode:
http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/dev_guide.services.$location
With so little information to go on, I can't answer your question, but perhaps that link will help you to help yourself. :)