Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

Grouped product reviews – fetching and showing associated simple product reviews

It is frustrating that core Magento has a mechanism to deal with configurable options reviews on a configurable product, but NOT simple products on a grouped products.

My site uses grouped products. As all orders are of simple products the reviews end up being of the simple products, but these won’t show on the grouped product page. I am looking to a) extend the reviews block to add simple product reviews and (ideally) b) extend the rating calculation to include simple products ratings too.

I have looked everywhere for any reviews extension that supported grouped products and could not find any. So trying to hash it out myself.

First attempt has been to try to extend the MagentoReviewBlockProductViewListView Block to fetch the list of associated product IDs and to pass this list to the collection classes, then somehow I need the collection classes to query for a list of products instead of a single one.

The collections classes MagentoReviewModelResourceModelReviewProductCollection and MagentoReviewModelResourceModelReviewCollection build a query via method AddEntityFilter using exact match, this needs to be changed from entity_pk_value=? to entity_pk_value in (?).

This is a tiny change that is technically backwards compatible so I tried using a plugin first. Alas query building is all protected methods so plugins cannot work, so it seems I need to bypass or extend the collection classes as a whole just to make that change.

Am I even going about this the right way? Is there a better one?