Search code examples
scalaapache-sparkapache-spark-sql

Select specific rows from Spark dataframe per grouping


I have a dataframe like that:

+-----------------+------------------+-----------+--------+---+
| conversation_id |   message_body   | timestamp | sender |   |
+-----------------+------------------+-----------+--------+---+
| A               | hi               | 9:00      | John   |   |
| A               | how are you?     | 10:00     | John   |   |
| A               | can we meet?     | 10:05     | John   | * |
| A               | not bad          | 10:30     | Steven | * |
| A               | great            | 10:40     | John   |   |
| A               | yeah, let's meet | 10:35     | Steven |   |
| B               | Hi               | 12:00     | Anna   | * |
| B               | Hello            | 12:05     | Ken    | * |
+-----------------+------------------+-----------+--------+---+

For each conversation I would like to have the last message in the first block of the 1st sender and the first message of the 2nd sender. I marked them with an asterisk.

One idea that I had is to assign 0s for the first user and 1s for the second user.

Ideally I would like to have something like that:

+-----------------+---------+------------+--------------+---------+------------+----------+
| conversation_id | sender1 | timestamp1 |   message1   | sender2 | timestamp2 | message2 |
+-----------------+---------+------------+--------------+---------+------------+----------+
| A               | John    | 10:05      | can we meet? | Steven  | 10:30      | not bad  |
| B               | Anna    | 12:00      | Hi           | Ken     | 12:05      | Hello    |
+-----------------+---------+------------+--------------+---------+------------+----------+

How could I do that in Spark?


Solution

  • Interesting issues arose.

    • Amended 10:35 to 10:45
    • Used leading 0 format e.g. 09:00 instead of 9:00
    • You will need to use your own data types accordingly, this simply demonstrates the approach needed
    • Done in DataBricks Notebook

      import org.apache.spark.sql.expressions.Window
      import org.apache.spark.sql.functions._ 
      import spark.implicits._
      
      val df = 
           Seq(("A", "hi", "09:00", "John"), ("A", "how are you?", "10:00", "John"), 
               ("A", "can we meet?", "10:05", "John"), ("A", "not bad", "10:30", "Steven"), 
               ("A", "great", "10:40", "John"), ("A", "yeah, let's meet", "10:45", "Steven"),
               ("B", "Hi", "12:00", "Anna"), ("B", "Hello", "12:05", "Ken")
              ).toDF("conversation_id", "message_body", "timestampX", "sender")
      
      // Get rank, 1 is who were initiates conversation, the other values can be used to infer relationships
      // Note no @Transient required here with Window 
      val df2 = df.withColumn("rankC", row_number().over(Window.partitionBy($"conversation_id").orderBy($"timestampX".asc)))
      
      // A value <> 1 is the first message of second Sender.
      // The 1 value of this is the last message of first "block"
      val df3 = df2.select('conversation_id as "df3_conversation_id", 'sender as "df3_sender", 'rankC as "df3_rank")
      // To avoid pipelined renaming issues that occur
      val df3a = df3.groupBy("df3_conversation_id", "df3_sender").agg(min("df3_rank") as "rankC2").filter("rankC2 != 1")
      
      //JOIN the values with some smarts. Some odd errors in Spark thru pipe-lining gotten. Need to drop pipelined row(), ranking etc.
      val df4 = df3a.join(df2, (df3a("df3_conversation_id") === df2("conversation_id")) && (df3a("rankC2") === df2("rankC") + 1)).drop("rankC").drop("rankC2")   
      val df4a = df3a.join(df2, (df3a("df3_conversation_id") === df2("conversation_id")) && (df3a("rankC2") === df2("rankC"))).drop("rankC").drop("rankC2")  
      
      // The get other missing data, could have all been combined but done in steps for simplicity. Just a simple final JOIN and you ahve the answer.
      val df5 = df4.join(df4a, (df4("df3_conversation_id") === df4a("df3_conversation_id")))  
      df5.show(false)
      

    returns:

    Output will not completely format here, run it in REPL to see titles.

     |B                  |Ken       |B              |Hi          |12:00     |Anna  |B                  |Ken       |B              |Hello       |12:05     |Ken   |
     |A                  |Steven    |A              |can we meet?|10:05     |John  |A                  |Steven    |A              |not bad     |10:30     |Steven|
    

    You can further manipulate the data, the heavy lifting is done now. The Catalyst Optimizer has some issues compiling etc. so this is why I worked around in this fashion.