pyspark/dataframe - creating a nested structure

Question

i\'m using pyspark with dataframe and would like to create a nested structure as below

Before:

Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 
--------------------------         


        

Answer 1

First, reproducible example of your dataframe.

js = [{"col1": "A", "col2":"B", "col3":1},{"col1": "A", "col2":"B", "col3":2},{"col1": "A", "col2":"C", "col3":1}]
jsrdd = sc.parallelize(js)
sqlContext = SQLContext(sc)
jsdf = sqlContext.read.json(jsrdd)
jsdf.show()
+----+----+----+
|col1|col2|col3|
+----+----+----+
|   A|   B|   1|
|   A|   B|   2|
|   A|   C|   1|
+----+----+----+

Now, lists are not stored as key value pairs. You can either use a dictionary or simple collect_list() after doing a groupby on column2.

jsdf.groupby(['col1', 'col2']).agg(F.collect_list('col3')).show()
+----+----+------------------+
|col1|col2|collect_list(col3)|
+----+----+------------------+
|   A|   C|               [1]|
|   A|   B|            [1, 2]|
+----+----+------------------+

Answer 2

I don't think you can get that exact output, but you can come close. The problem is your key names for the column 4. In Spark, structs need to have a fixed set of columns known in advance. But let's leave that for later, first, the aggregation:

import pyspark
from pyspark.sql import functions as F

sc = pyspark.SparkContext()
spark = pyspark.sql.SparkSession(sc)

data = [('A', 'B', 1), ('A', 'B', 2), ('A', 'C', 1)]
columns = ['Column1', 'Column2', 'Column3']

data = spark.createDataFrame(data, columns)

data.createOrReplaceTempView("data")
data.show()

# Result
+-------+-------+-------+
|Column1|Column2|Column3|
+-------+-------+-------+
|      A|      B|      1|
|      A|      B|      2|
|      A|      C|      1|
+-------+-------+-------+

nested = spark.sql("SELECT Column1, Column2, STRUCT(COLLECT_LIST(Column3) AS data) AS Column4 FROM data GROUP BY Column1, Column2")
nested.toJSON().collect()

# Result
['{"Column1":"A","Column2":"C","Column4":{"data":[1]}}',
 '{"Column1":"A","Column2":"B","Column4":{"data":[1,2]}}']

Which is almost what you want, right? The problem is that if you do not know your key names in advance (that is, the values in Column 2), Spark cannot determine the structure of your data. Also, I am not entirely sure how you can use the value of a column as key for a structure unless you use a UDF (maybe with a PIVOT?):

datatype = 'struct<B:array<bigint>,C:array<bigint>>'  # Add any other potential keys here.
@F.udf(datatype)
def replace_struct_name(column2_value, column4_value):
    return {column2_value: column4_value['data']}

nested.withColumn('Column5', replace_struct_name(F.col("Column2"), F.col("Column4"))).toJSON().collect()

# Output
['{"Column1":"A","Column2":"C","Column4":{"C":[1]}}',
 '{"Column1":"A","Column2":"B","Column4":{"B":[1,2]}}']

This of course has the drawback that the number of keys must be discrete and known in advance, otherwise other key values will be silently ignored.