Is there an easier way of creating a BO for a SQL View rather than manually creating the entire BO?
Yup...pull the schema from the SQL Server directly instead of trying to use the DDT. The DDT does allow you to create and deploy views, but instead of totally rewriting the logic behind SQL server parsing and retrieving the columns of the view, we thought it much easier to just pull a view schema from SQL Server. So on a BO that you intend to use as a view, choose the SQL Server option instead of the DDT (be sure to set the configuration properties for the SQL Server in the project properties), choose the view, and you are good to go.
How do I tell the BO to give the correct schema information to the UltraGrid at design time?
Well, in this case I am sure that you do not have all of your properties created like the BO mapper would, thus they don't show up. If you map like I mentioned above the columns will show up. But if you want to do it manually in the future for a custom property, then you will need to create a custom property, add the associated attributes, and it will appear. There are a ton of posts and docs concerning creating a custom property. But that would be what happened in this case.