Homestar9, while we await Priyank's further assessment of the docs, I'll assert that things are actually partly right and partly wrong. As is often the case with the CF docs, especially larger pages like that, they may reflect changes made over the years--both in CF and by different contributors to the docs--which may not always be as well-reconciled as they should be.
So first, it's not really right to say that "you can't reference a struct key like that in any version of ACF", when you show the use of the code:
<cfoutput>myVar.a.b is: #Variables["myVar.a.b"]#</cfoutput>
In that I mean you really CAN reference "a struct key" like that, if in this case the struct being referred to is the variables scope itself, which (like all scopes) can indeed be treated like a struct. It just depends on how one was setting the variables. For example, if one had done this (as tags or script):
variables["myVar.a.b"]="apple"
That would indeed have created a variable of that name (in quotes), and so the code above would "work".
Of course, your code shows using this instead:
variables.myVar.a.b = "apple"
And in that case, as the docs there do explain correctly, that would create a struct of the name myvar, with a struct of the name a, with a key of b. And so perhaps you may have meant "you can't refer to myvar that way, if it is a struct", and that is indeed true.
FWIW, it goes on to note that with scopes like cookie or client, you don't even need the quote around the variable name (when set), so this example of using ["myvar.a.b"] works also (reverting to a variant of their tag-based example):
<cfset cookie.myVar.a.b = "This is a test">
<cfoutput>#cookie["myvar.a.b"]#</cfoutput>
And note that they don't actually show trying to output variables["myvar.a.b"] on the page. Instead they show client["myvar.a.b"] (which is out of the blue, since the example above didn't set that). If they HAD shown your code, that would indeed be wrong.
I know all this could seem a quibble. But since part of the page was talking about "variables with periods in the name", there are indeed these differences worth distinguishing, there and in any assertions about what's there. 🙂
All that said, I'm agreeeing that the page is a bit of a mess there, with inconsistencies in some other wording and examples. And I agree that a reader could be led to make mistakes, so good on you for pointing it out.
Again, hopefully Priyank will be able to get things improved.
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