Spark: How to get String value while generating output file - scala

Question

I have two files
--------Student.csv---------
StudentId,City
101,NDLS
102,Mumbai
-------StudentDetails.csv---
StudentId,StudentName,Course
101,ABC,C001
102,XYZ,C002
Requirement
StudentId in first should be replaced with StudentName and Course in the second file.
Once replaced I need to generate a new CSV with complete details like
ABC,C001,NDLS
XYZ,C002,Mumbai
Code used
val studentRDD = sc.textFile(file path);
val studentdetailsRDD = sc.textFile(file path);
val studentB = sc.broadcast(studentdetailsRDD.collect)
//Generating CSV
studentRDD.map{student =>
val name = getName(student.StudentId)
val course = getCourse(student.StudentId)
Array(name, course, student.City)
}.mapPartitions{data =>
val stringWriter = new StringWriter();
val csvWriter =new CSVWriter(stringWriter);
csvWriter.writeAll(data.toList)
Iterator(stringWriter.toString())
}.saveAsTextFile(outputPath)
//Functions defined to get details
def getName(studentId : String) {
studentB.value.map{stud =>if(studentId == stud.StudentId) stud.StudentName}
}
def getCourse(studentId : String) {
studentB.value.map{stud =>if(studentId == stud.StudentId) stud.Course}
}
Problem
File gets generated but the values are object representations instead of String value.
How can I get the string values instead of objects ?

Answer 1

As suggested in another answer, Spark's DataFrame API is especially suitable for this, as it easily supports joining two DataFrames, and writing CSV files.
However, if you insist on staying with RDD API, looks like the main issue with your code is the lookup functions: getName and getCourse basically do nothing, because their return type is Unit; Using an if without an else means that for some inputs there's no return value, which makes the entire function return Unit.
To fix this, it's easier to get rid of them and simplify the lookup by broadcasting a Map:
// better to broadcast a Map instead of an Array, would make lookups more efficient
val studentB = sc.broadcast(studentdetailsRDD.keyBy(_.StudentId).collectAsMap())
// convert to RDD[String] with the wanted formatting
val resultStrings = studentRDD.map { student =>
val details = studentB.value(student.StudentId)
Array(details.StudentName, details.Course, student.City)
}
.map(_.mkString(",")) // naive CSV writing with no escaping etc., you can also use CSVWriter like you did
// save as text file
resultStrings.saveAsTextFile(outputPath)

Answer 2

Spark has great support for join and write to file. Join only takes 1 line of code and write also only takes 1.
Hand write those code can be error proven, hard to read and most likely super slow.
val df1 = Seq((101,"NDLS"),
(102,"Mumbai")
).toDF("id", "city")
val df2 = Seq((101,"ABC","C001"),
(102,"XYZ","C002")
).toDF("id", "name", "course")
val dfResult = df1.join(df2, "id").select("id", "city", "name")
dfResult.repartition(1).write.csv("hello.csv")
There will be a directory created. There is only 1 file in the directory which is the finally result.