UI Design / Workflow: Changing same property on multiple objects

Question

I am looking for a general UI design / work-flow for changing the same property across multiple objects.

Suppose I have an object class called Person. The Person class has a property called City. I want to select 5 Person objects and change the City property on all 5 to "New York" in one action in the UI.

This is not difficult to accomplish programatically, but I am having a difficult time coming up with an intuitive UI work-flow. One thought is to use a modal like the one used in iTunes to change information about multiple selected songs. I would like to come up with another work-flow, as this idea has already gotten push-back at work.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Edit: I appreciate the answers so far. There are couple of extra points I would like to call out:

1. Should the previous City values be display in some way? If so, how? Or how should the combined property screen show that all the City values are currently the same or different with a color or other indicator?
2. How should boolean properties (Person.IsAlive for example) be displayed? Do you use a three-state toggle/check box? Us a drop-down with three values? Other ideas?

Answer 1

Take the iTunes solution, ditch the modal window and display it in your application as you would otherwise display a single entry's edit view. Keep in mind that iTunes has a modal window for editing single entries as well.

Answer 2

I'd probably do this with a fairly standard listview - allow multiple selection - and when you change a field in any selected record (e.g. drop down) with more than one item selected it updates all of the items to the same value.

There may be times that you want to disable this action - so have an link item to the right to indicate that all items will be updated together.