It’s unusual for text to not show up in a DVL. There’s really not much to that process… you just map the field to a data source column. That’s it!
Could these issues be related to this problem? Dataviewer list problem with text - #6 by fredyfernando
Can you share a link to the project that has the DVL and local data source? I may be able to spot a problem with the way it’s set up.