Make sure nested child control is visible

Question

I have a utility routine that I call when validating user input in a dialog fails. It sets focus to the offending control, beeps and displays an appropriate message to the user. This works well as long as the offending control is not hidden. Now I have to adapt this to a situation where the relevant controls are children of some kind of collapsible group boxes (possibly even nested), and I have to make sure that the "ancestor" boxes are expanded before calling SetFocus.

Now I have a few possibilities:

• Build knowledge about the collapsible component into the error reporting routine. I'd like to avoid that as the routine should rather stay generic.
• Pass an callback that can be called prior to (or instead of) SetFocus. This is error prone because one has to remember to pass the callback at all the relevant places.
• My favourite solution would probably be an event (or overrideable method) (probably in TWinControl) that tells a container control "please make sure you and you child controls are visible" but I don't know of such a thing.

Any ideas how I can handle this situation?