Best way to do 'bulk edits' on a table

Question

I am building a web application for managing a list of products (using jqgrid).

I need my users to be able to perform several 'bulk actions' on whichever products they select. I have copied Gmail (and others) in that as soon as one or more rows are selected, more options appear at the top of the grid (see mockup).

These bulk actions will be performed in one or more modal boxes.

What I can't decide is how best to split up the bulk edit options.

Do I:

a) have each bulk actions option as a separate modal; one for changing the category, another for changing the price, another for changing the type, etc.

b) Try to get all options into one screen (see iTunes example)

c) Some combination of the two - e.g. separate modals for categorizing products, changing branch availability, but lumping some other fields (like price, tax codes, min/max order numbers) into one modal.

I am leaning towards C, but then the next issue is how users can edit just one attribute (e.g. price), without changing another attribute which is on the same screen (e.g. tax code).

iTunes has attempted to tackle this problem in their info screen when multiple songs have been selected, but I don't feel they have done a good job of making this intuitive (i.e. it's not clear what the checkboxes are for, and if I leave blank fields blank will it remove info for all selected files?).

Does anyone have examples/thoughts on a different/better way?

UPDATE: I have decided to keep each kind of edit separate as much as possible (each with its own link/button, like in Gmail).

There are a couple of examples where two or more fields will need to be put together, e.g. 'price' and 'cost' (if the cost changes, 90% of the time the price will need to change too). In which case I will do something like this:

Answer 1

I would suggest to do the bulk edit in a dialog that is similar to a "detail view" dialog. I.e. a dialog that shows all fields for a given item/record.

When you use this dialog to do bulk edit, you mark each field that contains various data with [various value] and the fields that contains equal values are set to the actual value.

The user may edit all fields, and the edited fields is then marked as "edited" (either visually, or you just keep track of this internally).

When the user exits the dialog and saves the changes, only the edited fields are saved, and the new values are applied to all items/records, of course.

(The check boxes can be removed from these screen shots.)

Answer 2

From your prototype:

1. I feel first column can be removed, you can give link for product name

2. Then, you are asking about bulk edit. First we need to identify the type of users and their scenarios. Always product name, price & tax will be different from other product. So IMHO is we can give option for separate edit option for each row.

3. You are specify the link name "details". this is not a details that is edit (it can be solved if you give product name as link)

4. I am using invoicing software,there is no bulk edit option for items. Though this is not my use case too.

5. We can give bulk option for (delete, inactive, create another entity using these items....)

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From popup image:

1. We can remove the checkbox to edit. He know came for edit only, why we give two click to users? Just show the two text boxes (price & cost) and "save" button.