AngularJS: Routing runs controller twice

I'm trying to build custom radio buttons, and I've discovered that my controllers are being executed twice for each instance. I have not specified the view controller twice. That seems to be the common problem. I'm using angular-routing, and the relevant snippet for that is this:

$routeProvider.when('/:action', {
    templateUrl: function (params) {
        if (!params.action) params.action = 'Index';
        return '_' + params['action'];
    }
});

I use ng-controller in the template. The routeChangeSuccessful event (or whatever it's called) fires, and it compiles everything normally, but it seems to follow up with some post link function that also compiles everything; thus the double instances.

What am I doing wrong? How can I avoid the duplicate calls?

Update

I've discovered that it's recompiling the initial view, whatever that was, when routing through AngularJS. I can work around this by adding a secret blank page that is always hit first (I'm developing in an .NET MVC project, so I can control that through the MVC routing), but that seems rather silly.

Why is ngRoute recompiling the initial view every time? Is there an elegant workaround?

Solution

Last I checked, ngView doesn't prevent the compilation of the template that is initially fetched, and in fact it recompiles it when the view changes before replacing it and compiling the template fetched by ngRoute.

To resolve this, have only AngularJS requests return templates. Return a blank template otherwise. I handle this by having the AngularJS requests include an underscore prefix. In the MVC routing, if the underscore is there, return the requested partial; otherwise, return the layout with an empty body.