Ok, so I've got a strange problem that I've been beating my head against for over a week now. I'm holding out a little hope that maybe someone here has seen something like this and has a solution or at least can point me in a direction to make some sense of it.
We are running an enterprise application on CF9 currently. Recently we made a large update with some advancements and in part of the advancements I'm using some request scoped variables. Now I don't need to hear about how this breaks encapsulation and yada, yada. There is good reason for doing it the way we have, I can't go into complete details but it's necessary.
Said request variable is a structure that is set in Application.cfc OnRequestStart. Randomly since the changes have been put on our production servers we get an error email (we have an error handler defined to capture and email errors when they occur), stating that key.subkey is undefined in request scoped variable. What makes this so bizarre is in the email from the error handler (that is processed in the same request) shows the key.subkey existing in the request scoped variable in a <cfdump var="#request#"> in the email. How could it possibly be erroring on a part of the page that runs after OnRequestStart, but before OnError, saying that this structure element doesn't exist yet it does exist during the error handler caused by it. The request scoped variable btw is not defined or set anywhere else outside of the Application.cfc.
I should also mention that other keys in the structure are referenced in the request prior to the point of failure without erroring, some in the same function as the point of error even. It's almost as if the structure is not fully defined yet while it's processing the page request, but it is fully defined by the time it dumps it in the error email....
This problem is really baffling me, and it makes it worse that I can't find any way to reproduce it on our testing servers.