We have legacy code written in AngularJS that does not use controllerAs.
Our BaseController (Plunker: script.js line 19) has this code to make all class methods available in $scope without writing this.$scope.method = ...
this.$scope[key] = this[key].bind(this)
Now since we are starting to migrate to Controller as vm syntax we do not need this code any more. In Plunker NewCtrl does not even need $scope injected, but because of this line we need to.
Question: How to find out if current controller (NewCtrl) is used with controllerAs syntax or not?
If your app uses ui-router, you could use $state service to check if a controller is declared with as syntax.
$state.get() returns a list of all registered states. Inside each item you can check for controllerAs existance or 'as' inside controller :
controller: 'testCtrl as vm' or
controllerAs: 'vm'
From inside a controller, you could use $state.current as above.