Use data in Spark Dataframe column as condition or input in another column expression - apache-spark

Question

I have an operation that I want to perform within PySpark 2.0 that would be easy to perform as a df.rdd.map, but since I would prefer to stay inside the Dataframe execution engine for performance reasons, I want to find a way to do this using Dataframe operations only.
The operation, in RDD-style, is something like this:
def precision_formatter(row):
formatter = "%.{}f".format(row.precision)
return row + [formatter % row.amount_raw / 10 ** row.precision]
df = df.rdd.map(precision_formatter)
Basically, I have a column that tells me, for each row, what the precision for my string formatting operation should be, and I want to selectively format the 'amount_raw' column as a string depending on that precision.

Answer 1

I don't know of a way to use the contents of one or more columns as input to another Column operation. The closest I can come is suggesting the use of Column.when with an externally-defined set of boolean operations that correspond to the set of possible boolean conditions/cases within the column or columns.
In this specific case, for instance, if you can obtain (or better yet, already have) all possible values of row.precision, then you can iterate over that set and apply a Column.when operation for each value in the set. I believe this set can be obtained with df.select('precision').distinct().collect().
Because the pyspark.sql.functions.when and Column.when operations themselves return a Column object, you can iterate over the items in the set (however it was obtained) and keep 'appending' when operations to each other programmatically until you have exhausted the set:
import pyspark.sql.functions as PSF
def format_amounts_with_precision(df, all_precisions_set):
amt_col = PSF.when(df['precision'] == 0, df['amount_raw'].cast(StringType()))
for precision in all_precisions_set:
if precision != 0: # this is a messy way of having a base case above
fmt_str = '%.{}f'.format(precision)
amt_col = amt_col.when(df['precision'] == precision,
PSF.format_string(fmt_str, df['amount_raw'] / 10 ** precision)
return df.withColumn('amount', amt_col)

Answer 2

You can do it with a python UDF. They can take as many input values (values from columns of a Row) and spit out a single output value. It would look something like this:
from pyspark.sql import types as T, functions as F
from pyspark.sql.function import udf, col
# Create example data frame
schema = T.StructType([
T.StructField('precision', T.IntegerType(), False),
T.StructField('value', T.FloatType(), False)
])
data = [
(1, 0.123456),
(2, 0.123456),
(3, 0.123456)
]
rdd = sc.parallelize(data)
df = sqlContext.createDataFrame(rdd, schema)
# Define UDF and apply it
def format_func(precision, value):
format_str = "{:." + str(precision) + "f}"
return format_str.format(value)
format_udf = F.udf(format_func, T.StringType())
new_df = df.withColumn('formatted', format_udf('precision', 'value'))
new_df.show()
Also, if instead of the column precision value you wanted to use a global one, you could use the lit(..) function when you call it like this:
new_df = df.withColumn('formatted', format_udf(F.lit(2), 'value'))