Is there an easy way to read a property defined in one of the parents scopes from a controller? Just like Angular does in templates, as the docs explains:
When Angular evaluates {{name}}, it first looks at the scope associated with the given element for the name property. If no such property is found, it searches the parent scope and so on until the root scope is reached. In JavaScript this behavior is known as prototypical inheritance, and child scopes prototypically inherit from their parents.
But this behaviour is not applied inside controllers, if you write $scope.name
it just looks in the current scope.