Angular Routing templateUrl with Express backend not working

Question

I am having an issue getting a partial to display using angular routing and express. I am trying to set things up so I can still use pug (formerly jade) to write shortform html. As far as I can tell, everything should be working, no errors, everything is pulling correctly. I have most other portions of the application working (api calls, controllers, etc.) My main page is as follows:

    doctype html
    html(ng-app='myapp')
        head
            base(href='/')
            script(src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.5.7/angular.js")
            script(src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.5.7/angular-route.js")

        body
             header#main

            .content(ng-view)


             script(src="/js/app.js")
             script(src="/js/controllers/adminController.js")
             script(src="/js/routes.js")

Here is my routes file

angular.module('myapp')
.config(function ($routeProvider, $locationProvider) {
    $routeProvider
        .when('/admin', {
            templateUrl: '/templates/admin',
            controller: 'AdminController',
            caseInsensitiveMatch: true
        })
        .otherwise({
            template: '<h1>Page not found</h1>'
        })
    ;
    $locationProvider.html5Mode(true);
});

And finally, the express route:

router.get('/templates/:name', function(req, res, next) {
     var name = 'templates/' + req.params.name;
     console.log('Express: ' + name);
     res.render(name, function(err, html){
        //this callback function can be removed. It's just for debugging.
        if(err)
            console.log("Error: " + err);
        else
            console.log("We're good!");
        res.send(html);
     });
 });

Lastly, here is the node server output:

Express: index
GET /admin 304 68.962 ms - -
GET /js/app.js 304 0.994 ms - -
GET /js/controllers/adminController.js 304 0.751 ms - -
GET /js/routes.js 304 14.590 ms - -
Express: templates/admin
We're good!
GET /templates/admin 304 368.081 ms - -

As you can see, the index loads, calls the partial, and the template is getting called and rendered just as you would expect.

The problem is ng-view is not getting replaced or updated. It all works just fine if I change the route to template instead of templateUrl, and just print out a line of text, so I know routing is working and this isn't an app configuration issue.

I've been stuck on this for a few days, and without any error messages, I am completely in the the dark as to why this doesn't work.

Additionally, when I check the following in my controller, I get the partial, so it is coming through properly:

angular.module('buriedcinema.controllers')
    .controller('AdminController', ['$templateCache', function(Movies, Users, $templateCache){
    console.log($templateCache.get('templates/admin'));
}
console:
<h1> this is my partial </h1>

Answer 1

Fixed by adding "controllerAs:" option to my routing and referring to my controller by the object name.

.when('/admin', {
            templateUrl: 'templates/admin',
            controller: 'AdminController',
            controllerAs: 'adminCtrl',
            caseInsensitiveMatch: true
        })

The more technical explanation is that I wasn't instantiating an object with state, but trying to use my controller statically so it never updated. Hope this can help someone else.