Code generation for views broken when using custom MVC ViewData classes

I'm by no means lazy, but already 2 days overdue on our current sprint in my first ever MVC project, so I've been using the Add View Wizard to generate strongly typed views, but now that I have started using ViewData classes as view models, the wizard generates fields for ViewDataBase, and not my derived ViewData.

I think that the derived ViewData is built by a factory at runtime, and assume that is why the designer/wizard can only give me the base class properties, but is there anything I can do about this?

Solution

ProfK,

Here is what I tried (VS 2010, MVC2):

public class ViewDataBase
{
    public int ID { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

public class CustomerViewData : ViewDataBase
{
    public string Address { get; set; }
}

Right clicked on my Action and created a strongly typed Details view using CustomerViewData. The following gets generated:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<MyApplication.Models.CustomerViewData>" %>

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
    <head runat="server">
        <title>Index</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <fieldset>
            <legend>Fields</legend>

            <div class="display-label">Address</div>
            <div class="display-field"><%: Model.Address %></div>

            <div class="display-label">ID</div>
            <div class="display-field"><%: Model.ID %></div>

            <div class="display-label">Name</div>
            <div class="display-field"><%: Model.Name %></div>

        </fieldset>
        <p>
            <%: Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", new { /* id=Model.PrimaryKey */ }) %> |
            <%: Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") %>
        </p>

    </body>
    </html>