assign values to a new column depending on old column values in dataframe - scala

Question

I have assigned values to 4 variables in a conf or application.properties file,
A = 1
B = 2
C = 3
D = 4
I have a dataframe as follows,
+-----+
|name |
+-----+
| A |
| C |
| B |
| D |
| B |
+-----+
I want to add a new column that has the values assigned from the conf variables declared above for A,B,C,D respectively depending on the value in the name column.
Final Dataframe should have,
+----+----------+
|name|NAME_VALUE|
+----+----------+
| A | 1 |
| C | 3 |
| B | 2 |
| D | 4 |
| B | 2 |
+----+----------+
I tried lit function in .WITHCOLUMN with conf.getint($name), not accepting Column in lit func requires string, I have to hardcode the variable names in lit. Is there anyway for me to dynamically assign those respective conf variable names in LIT so it can automatically assign values to another column in spark scala?

Answer 1

For this moment i dont have any ideas how to do it as you intended with dynamic usage of vals names.
My proposition is to use a seq of tuples instead of multiple vals, in such case you can create some udf and try to map this value for each row, but you can also use join which i am showing in below example:
val data = Seq(("A"),("C"), ("B"), ("D"), ("B"))
val df = data.toDF("name")
val mappings = Seq(("A",1), ("B",2), ("C",3), ("D",4))
val mappingsDf = mappings.toDF("name", "value")
df.join(broadcast(mappingsDf), df("name") === mappingsDf("name"), "left")
.select(
df("name"),
mappingsDf("value")
).show
output is as expected:
+----+-----+
|name|value|
+----+-----+
| A| 1|
| C| 3|
| B| 2|
| D| 4|
| B| 2|
+----+-----+
This solution is pretty generic as your mapping are df here so you can hardcode them as showed in my example or load them from some csv or json easily with spark api
Due to broadcast join it should be quite efficient (you should remove this hint if you want to use big amount of mappings!)
I think its easy to understand and maintain as its not udf but only Spark api