How to downcast in Unity C# when you need to access specific subclass information on hover?

EDIT 2

This is what is being shown in the unity debugger when I look at the list of Items. It is seeing the baseball bat as an Item type, not WeaponItem type.

EDIT 1

This is currently all I have in my ItemsContainer ( my old file has the bloated xml file)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<ItemsContainer>
  <Items>
    <!--Weapon Items-->
       <WeaponItem Name = "Baseball Bat" ID="501">
          <!--General Info-->
          <Description>A wooden bat that may have belonged to somone famous</Description>
          <!--Weapon Item-->
          <Damage>4</Damage>
          <Targets>1</Targets>
       </WeaponItem>
   </Items>
</ItemsContainer>

ORIGINAL POST

I'm working on a complex inventory system for a 2D game in Unity.

I read game data with XML serialization and have set up a drag/drop system that works using an Item class. I've also gotten pretty far with a dialogue system that can tell what items are in certain characters inventories.

Issue:

Want to be able to downcast to an item subclass in order to access specific data about it on a UI hover (At least that's what I think I need to do), or find another solution on how to setup my item database

For eg:

• When you hover over a WeaponItem - it shows you damage information + desc
• When you hover over a general Item - it only shows you desc

History:

What I have right now is a very bloated Items.xml file that has all tags necessary, regardless of item category. This is really painful to maintain as I come up with new Items and categories - so I wanted to try inheritance.

At first, my initial approach was:

<ItemsContainer>
   <Items>
      <Item>
          <!-- Generic tags or attributes: ID, Name, Description etc -->
          <!-- Other tags that define the item, is there in every item!-->
      </Item>
   </Items>
</ItemsContainer>

and now it's this:

<ItemsContainer>
   <Items>
      <WeaponItem>
          <!-- Generic tags or attributes: ID, Name, Description etc -->
          <!-- WeaponItem specific tags: Damage, Targets Etc -->
      </WeaponItem>
      <ClothingItem>
          <!-- Generic tags or attributes: ID, Name, Description etc -->
          <!-- ClothingItem specific tags: Exposure, ArmorRating Etc -->
      </ClothingItem>
      .
      . 
      .
   </Items>
</ItemsContainer>

My Item class looks like this:

public class Item 
{
   [XmlAttribute("Name")]
   public string Name;
   [XmlAttribute("ID")]
   public int ID;
   // General Info
   public string Description;
   public virtual string GetDetails()
   {
      return
        "\nName: " + Name +
        "\nID: " + ID +
        "\nDescription: " + Description;
   }
}

While my subclass WeaponItem looks like this:

class WeaponItem : Item
{
   public int Damage;
   public int Targets;
   public override string GetDetails()
   {
       return
           base.ToString() +
        "\nDamage: " + Damage +
        "\nTargets: " + Targets;
   }
}

Here's what my ItemsContainer looks like:

[XmlRoot("ItemsContainer")]
public class ItemsContainer
{
    [XmlArray("Items"),XmlArrayItem("WeaponItem"), XmlArrayItem("ClothingItem"),...]
    public List<Item> Items = new List<Item>();

    public static ItemsContainer Load(string path)
    {
       TextAsset _xml = Resources.Load<TextAsset>(path);
       XmlSerializer Serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ItemsContainer));
       StringReader reader = new StringReader(_xml.text);
       ItemsContainer items = Serializer.Deserialize(reader) as ItemsContainer;
       reader.Close();
       return items;
    }
}

My ItemUI class contains:

• Item variable
• Several public game objects (I have a prefab of the game object this class is attached to)
• OnDrag, EndDrag, BeginDrag methods

What I want to do in ItemUI - is sort of something like this:

public void HoverOn()
{
    if(Item.Class == "Weapon")
    { 
        WeaponItem WeaponItem = (WeaponItem) Item; // Downcast Fail
        Damage.txt = WeaponItem.GetDamage() + "";
        Damage.gameObject.SetVisible(true);
    }
    else if(Item.Class = "Clothing")
    {
        ClothingItem ClothingItem = (ClothingItem) Item; // Downcast Fail
        Exposure.txt = ClothingItem.GetExposure() + "";
        Exposure.gameObject.SetVisible(true);
    }
    ItemInfo.gameObject.SetVisible(true);
}

Question:

With the fact that I want my items in separate categories in XML, how would I accomplish showing Item information based on the subclass of the Item, if all I have at the time of access is a higher level Item class type?