what is the best way to bind a datacolumn to a property that might or might not exist in the datasource?

This happens for example when you have a class hierarchy where some children might be of a subtype which has the property. The datasource contains various subclass types.

```
<DataColumn outputText="#{item.property}" />

```

always yields a PropertyNotFoundException when the property isn't present in one of the subclasses. I don't want to include the property in the base class because it shouldn't be there according to the business rules. 

How would you solve this problem?