List of product options with quantity field per option (which is associated product of configurable)

Question

Most products on this store are configurable products. Each configurable product has associated products, each with it's own quantity set so inventory is tracked.

At the frontend, these configurable products are visible (and the associated products not visible individually) and each configurable product has a dropdown which display the options that the customer can select (these being the associated products).

What we need to modify is for these options to be all visible in a list, each with a quantity field so the custom can enter quantities for multiple options at once and add to cart.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of an extension that can provide this functionality or how you would advise implementing this with the minimal amount of change?

I guess we could use grouped products for this but it would be a royal headache changing how practically every product on the site is set up.

The extensions we've seen so far that offer this functionality only seem to modify the functionality of the 'Custom Options' feature.

Your suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Edit

I've just tested this and a Grouped product works perfectly for what we're after. The only problem is this is a multi-store and we only want the options with quantity fields to be on one store only. So unless I'm not mistaken, will require creating two of every product just so that on the retail store, they will be configurable products and on the wholesale store they will be grouped products.

Edit 2

Further testing and the following scenario works:-

Retail Store

• Parent Product (00X) <-- This is a configurable
  • Child Product (00A)
  • Child Product (00A)
  • Child Product (00A)

Wholesale Store

• Parent Product (00Y) <-- This is a grouped
  • Child Product (00A)
  • Child Product (00A)
  • Child Product (00A)

The three child products under the configurable and the grouped are the same products. This means that only the parent product will have to be duplicated in the catalog (instead of every product).

• A parent product (configurable) for the retail store.
• A parent product (grouped) for the wholesale store.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone would have approached this differently...

Answer 1

As per the updates in the original question, we found the below solution (workaround?) to provide the best way of achieving what we wanted. I think the only other way would have been to either create a completely new product type for these or implement some condition based extending of the configurable and grouped product types...

Further testing and the following scenario works:-

Retail Store

• Parent Product (00X) <-- This is a configurable
  • Child Product (00A)
  • Child Product (00A)
  • Child Product (00A)

Wholesale Store

• Parent Product (00Y) <-- This is a grouped
  • Child Product (00A)
  • Child Product (00A)
  • Child Product (00A)

The three child products under the configurable and the grouped are the same products. This means that only the parent product will have to be duplicated in the catalog (instead of every product).

• A parent product (configurable) for the retail store.
• A parent product (grouped) for the wholesale store.