You can build it in the theme or build a plugin. I’ve don’t both. I don’t do things like this often, I’ve had maybe 2 clients that have needed something like it. The example I linked to uses 2 different CPTs, but it could be done with parent/child posts or CPTs and taxonomies. It’s a pretty basic example, the important part is done by the AJAX requests and the population of the select fields from the right data.
