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Currently you can fairly easily accomplish adding the attribute as you requested by adding one more search criteria of <attribute> "does not exist" to your existing search.
The two ways of "fixing" the current multiple item selection with mismatched attributes are (that I can think of):
1) instead of only showing only the attributes common to all the selected Info Items, show a superset of every attribute assigned to at least one selected Info Item
->Advantage: you could just assign a value to this attribute to ensure it exists for the entire selection
->Disadvantage: instead of a small list of common attributes, you would have a very large list of potentially unrelated attributes
->Disadvantage: assigning a value to this attribute would overwrite the value of any existing attributes
2) leave what is displayed in the Item Attributes pane the same, but allow adding the attribute even though it does exist for some (but not all) of the selected Items (adding it with a NULL value but leaving the values where already existing).
->Advantage: this would continue showing a limited, common list of attributes
->Disadvantage: this behavior would be different from the current behavior in that adding an attribute wouldn't leave all the selected Info Items with identical values for the specified attribute after the add (which is more generally consistent)
Initially I was thinking that option 1 was desireable, but after considering it more, I believe #2 is better, but I am not entirely convinced that it is better than the current behavior.
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