Server side material list?

I'm putting the finishing touches on a new resource which combines reskinning and multiple textures. It's all working great but I have a less elegant portion which trouble me.

The problem:
Server in TGE does not load material list when it loads a shape. I rely on having a list of the base materials stored server side per shape so we can tell new clients who join what the changes to those base materials are.

The solution I've come up with involves adding fields to the datablock for a shape and setting the server side texture list manually in an OnAdd. This is an extra step which could be removed if I could find an elegant way to have the server load up the materialnames out of the shape.

Has anyone tried this before? I've taken many approached but none that worked.