ASP.NET MVC Partial View gotcha

In our large MVC project, we have quite often decomposed views into pages containing partial views. For example, if a profile widget is used on multiple different pages, then it becomes a partial view (MiniProfile.cshtml). We would then have the model object used by the partial view as a child property on the model object of the main view. For example:

public class MyPageViewModel
{
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public MiniProfileViewModel MiniProfile { get; set; }
}

public class MiniProfileViewModel
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string AvatarUrl { get; set; } 
}

The child partial is then included in the main view using @Html.RenderPartial("MiniProfile", Model.MiniProfile) directive.

Today I had an interesting debugging experience when I received this error message on viewing an ASP.NET MVC page: The model item passed into the dictionary is of type 'PhilTest.MyPageViewModel', but this dictionary requires a model item of type 'PhilTest.ChildViewModel'.

In this case the error message was actually a bit misleading. The view model passed into the partial view wasn't the wrong type at all, it was just null. So when the child object is null, ASP.NET seems to think that the partial view has been passed the type of the parent object.

I had assumed that it would be OK to have the child object being null, as long as I checked for this in the child view:

@Model MiniProfileViewModel
@if (Model != null)
{
    <div class="mini-profile">
        <span class="name">@Model.Name</span>
        <img src="@Model.AvatarUrl">
    </div>
}

However, it seems ASP.NET will raise the exception before it gets to render the view, therefore the solution is to simply move the check into the main parent view:

@if (Model.MiniProfile != null)
{
	@Html.RenderPartial("MiniProfile", Model.MiniProfile)
}

Unfortunately that means you may have to duplicate this "not null" check across multiple views. Perhaps this is a code smell that is telling us to avoid nullable properties, also referred to by me as "partially inflated objects", in the first place?