How to use constant value in UDF of Spark SQL(DataFrame)

Question

I have a dataframe which includes timestamp. To aggregate by time(minute, hour, or day), I have tried as:

val toSegment = udf((timestamp: String) => {
  val asLong = timestamp.toLong
  asLong - asLong % 3600000 // period = 1 hour
})

val df: DataFrame // the dataframe
df.groupBy(toSegment($"timestamp")).count()

This works fine.

My question is how to generalize the UDF toSegment as

val toSegmentGeneralized = udf((timestamp: String, period: Int) => {
  val asLong = timestamp.toLong
  asLong - asLong % period
})

I have tried as follows but it doesn't work

df.groupBy(toSegment($"timestamp", $"3600000")).count()

It seems to find the column named 3600000.

Possible solution is to use constant column but I couldn't find it.

Answer 1

You can use org.apache.spark.sql.functions.lit() to create the constant column:

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions._

df.groupBy(toSegment($"timestamp", lit(3600000))).count()