How to merge edits from one dataframe into another dataframe in Spark? - apache-spark

Question

I have a dataframe df1 with 150 columns and many rows. I also have a dataframe df2 with the same schema but very few rows containing edits that should be applied to df1 (there's a key column id to identify which row to update). df2 has only columns with updates populated. The other of the columns are null. What I want to do is to update the rows in df1 with correspoding rows from dataframe df2 in the following way:
if a column in df2 is null, it should not cause any changes in df1
if a column in df2 contains a tilde "~", it should result in nullifying that column in df1
otherwise the value in column in df1 should get replaced with the value from df2
How can I best do it? Can it be done in a generic way without listing all the columns but rather iterating over them? Can it be done using dataframe API or do I need to switch to RDDs?
(Of course by updating dataframe df1 I mean creating a new, updated dataframe.)
Example
Let's say the schema is: id:Int, name:String, age: Int.
df1 is:
1,"Greg",18
2,"Kate",25
3,"Chris",30
df2 is:
1,"Gregory",null
2,~,26
The updated dataframe should look like this:
1,"Gregory",18
2,null,26
3,"Chris",30

Answer 1

you can also use case or coalesce using full outer join to merge the two dataframes. see a link below for an explanation.
Spark incremental loading overwrite old record

Answer 2

I figured out how to do it with an intermediate conversion to RDD. First, create a map idsToEdits where keys are row ids and values are maps of column numbers to values (only the non-null ones).
val idsToEdits=df2.rdd.map{row=>
(row(0),
row.getValuesMap[AnyVal](row.schema.fieldNames.filterNot(colName=>row.isNullAt(row.fieldIndex(colName))))
.map{case (k,v)=> (row.fieldIndex(k),if(v=="~") null else v)} )
}.collectAsMap()
Broadast that map and define an editRow function updating a row.
val idsToEditsBr=sc.broadcast(idsToEdits)
import org.apache.spark.sql.Row
val editRow:Row=>Row={ row =>
idsToEditsBr
.value
.get(row(0))
.map{edits => Row.fromSeq(edits.foldLeft(row.toSeq){case (rowSeq,
(idx,newValue))=>rowSeq.updated(idx,newValue)})}
.getOrElse(row)
}
Finally, use that function on RDD derived from df1 and convert back to a dataframe.
val updatedDF=spark.createDataFrame(df1.rdd.map(editRow),df1.schema)

Answer 3

It sounds like your question is how to perform this without explcitly naming all the columns so I will assume you have some "doLogic" udf function or dataframe functions to perform your logic after joining.
import org.apache.spark.sql.types.StringType
val cols = df1.schema.filterNot(x => x.name == "id").map({ x =>
if (x.dataType == StringType) {
doLogicUdf(col(x), col(x + "2")))
} else {
when(col(x + "2").isNotNull, col(x + "2")).otherwise(col(x))
}
}) :+ col("id")
val df2 = df2.select(df2.columns.map( x=> col(x).alias(x+"2")) : _*))
df1.join(df2, col("id") ===col("id2") , "inner").select(cols : _*)