You know that by now your Angular code should be pretty $scope free. The controllerAs syntax makes it so you shouldn’t be accessing $scope in order to store information on it.

But, scopes are still an important part of Angular and sometimes you have to use them.

One not-so-rare example is the $scope.$watch() function. With the introduction of controllerAs syntax we now have 2 seemingly interchangeable ways to use it. But, they are not exactly the same and I think you should only be using one. Let’s quickly go over it.

The olden days

In the pre-controllerAs days we would put everything directly on the $scope.

So, you might have $scope.foo and then, to watch for changes, you’d use $scope.$watch('foo', fooChanged).

That just worked. But with controllerAs it’s not that simple. If in your controller code you use this.foo, you can no longer just watch for changes using $scope.$watch('foo', ...).

That’s because the 'foo' part looking for foo directly on the scope, not your controller’s instance.

The bad option – using the controller’s name

The way a lot of people are solving this is by using the controller’s name in the expression.

If you’re using Angular 1.5’s components then the controllerAs name is $ctrl by default. So you’d use $scope.$watch('$ctrl.foo', ...).

If you have a different name, like stuffCtrl then you’d use $scope.$watch('stuffCtrl.foo', ...) etc.

I don’t like this for several reasons:

• It feels foreign to me to use a name that’s essentially only used in the template (the controllerAs name), while the rest of the controller code uses this or vm.
• Using this name means that in case you decide to rename it, you’ll have to look for it in both the template and the controller code.

The right way

It was always possible to pass a function to $watch() as the expression that you’re keeping track of.

Because of that, it’s possible to do something like this:

$scope.$watch(function() { return vm.foo; }, ...)

(Of course, it’s even nicer if you’re using ES6’s arrow functions.)

I believe this is better, even though it involves more typing, because it keeps your controller code consistent. You always refer to things the same, and there are no magic strings.