In being careful, I want to check if my custom attribute exists before I attempt to utilize it in any way. I need to check against all attributes collection, not just the product collection. My attribute may exist on a customer, a product, or on a custom model of my own creation.
In magento 1.x, I'd use the following:
$attr = Mage::getResourceModel('eav/entity_attribute_collection')->setCodeFilter('specialty')->getFirstItem();
if ($attr->getAttributeId() > 0) {
Do some stuff....'
I can't find anything that explicitly does something like this