scala - Spark: Add column to dataframe conditionally

Question

I am trying to take my input data:

A    B       C
--------------
4    blah    2
2            3
56   foo     3

And add a column to the end based on whether B is empty or not:

A    B       C     D
--------------------
4    blah    2     1
2            3     0
56   foo     3     1

I can do this easily by registering the input dataframe as a temp table, then typing up a SQL query.

But I'd really like to know how to do this with just Scala methods and not having to type out a SQL query within Scala.

I've tried .withColumn, but I can't get that to do what I want.

Answer 1

Try withColumn with the function when as follows:

val sqlContext = new SQLContext(sc)
import sqlContext.implicits._ // for `toDF` and $""
import org.apache.spark.sql.functions._ // for `when`

val df = sc.parallelize(Seq((4, "blah", 2), (2, "", 3), (56, "foo", 3), (100, null, 5)))
    .toDF("A", "B", "C")

val newDf = df.withColumn("D", when($"B".isNull or $"B" === "", 0).otherwise(1))

newDf.show() shows

+---+----+---+---+
|  A|   B|  C|  D|
+---+----+---+---+
|  4|blah|  2|  1|
|  2|    |  3|  0|
| 56| foo|  3|  1|
|100|null|  5|  0|
+---+----+---+---+

I added the (100, null, 5) row for testing the isNull case.

I tried this code with Spark 1.6.0 but as commented in the code of when, it works on the versions after 1.4.0.