Question

I am looking at Angular API reference. It says that ngController is a directive, and give the following example:

function SettingsController($scope) {
 $scope.name = "John Smith";
}

This looks exactly like a plain Javascript function, with argument $scope passed in. I thought to define directives, we need to call:

app.directive("name", func())

Does Angular treats any function with $scope argument as controller directive? Or only if we modify DOM element to include ng-controller = “SettingsController” that SettingsController will be interpreted as such?

Answer 1

ngController is the directive (directives are always referred to in the DOM–Angular allows you to specify directives via tag names, attributes, class names and comments). The ngController directive is written so that it will create a controller instance based on the name that is passed in to the directive (in this case the string "SettingsController". The function itself is not a directive.