ui-bootstrap pagination resetting current page on initialization

So I found a solution after drilling down into the angular-bootstrap code. Their code has a watch on totalPages that checks if the current page is greater than the totalPages value.

angular-bootstrap code:

if ( $scope.page > value ) {
  $scope.selectPage(value);
} else {
  ngModelCtrl.$render();
}

What was happening was if I refreshed the page on page 3 (for example) my controller was reloading the items for that page temporarily causing total-items to be 0 and totalPages to be calculated as 1. This triggered the watch and the above code.

My solution was to load the items in the state resolve so that total-items (and in turn totalPages) would always be accurate.