I\'m currently trying to write tests for existing blocks of code and running into an issue with a controller that has a nested ng-grid inside of it. The issue comes from the con
Your (major!) problem here is that the controller is making assumptions about a View. It should not know about and thus not interact with ng-grid. Controllers should be View-independent! That quality (and Dependency Injection) is what makes controllers highly testable. The controller should only change the ViewModel (i.e. its $scope), and in testing you validate that the ViewModel is correct.
Doing otherwise goes against the MVVM paradigm and best practices.
If you feel like you must access the View (i.e. directives, DOM elements, etc...) from the controller, you are likely doing something wrong.