Multi-Tiered Custom Options

Question

I have not been able to find any reference to something even similar to this so I figured I would post here for some ideas.

I have a sample pack product that allows customers to choose up to 5 flavors, and another option called strength.

Right now, the flavors are chosen by checkbox and the strength chosen by dropdown like this:

Flavor Checkboxes
     Flavor1
     Flavor2
     Flavor3
     Flavor4
     Flavor5
Strength Dropdown
     Str1
     Str2
     Str3
     Str4

There is a high demand from my customers to be able to choose a different strength for each flavor.

To prevent overall ugliness what I would like to do is create multiple tiers within custom options like this:

Flavor Checkboxes
    Flavor1
       Strength Dropdown
             Str1
             Str2
             Str3
             Str4
    Flavor2
       Strength Dropdown
             Str1
             Str2
             Str3
             Str4
    Flavor3
       Strength Dropdown
             Str1
             Str2
             Str3
             Str4
    Flavor4
       Strength Dropdown
             Str1
             Str2
             Str3
             Str4
    Flavor5
       Strength Dropdown
             Str1
             Str2
             Str3
             Str4

Any ideas or solutions would be greatly appreciated. If this has been done before or is available in an extension that would be awesome, if not I am open to ideas on how to add this feature in myself.

Version: CE-1.7.0.2, Custom Theme

Answer 1

Serialize might be the way to go. If you get the check-boxes to update a serialised string - think JSON - then save that to your product. Make it a frontend thing and have some module with utilities to unpack that data for presentation in templates.