Scala convert WrappedArray or Array[Any] to Array[String]

Question

I've been trying to convert an RDD to a dataframe. For that, the types need to be defined and not Any. I'm using spark MLLib PrefixSpan, that's where freqSequence.sequence is from. I start with a dataframe that contains Session_IDs, views and purchases as String-Arrays:

viewsPurchasesGrouped: org.apache.spark.sql.DataFrame =
  [session_id: decimal(29,0), view_product_ids: array[string], purchase_product_ids: array[string]]

I then calculate frequent patterns and need them in a dataframe so I can write them to a Hive table.

val viewsPurchasesRddString = viewsPurchasesGrouped.map( row => Array(Array(row(1)), Array(row(2)) ))

val prefixSpan = new PrefixSpan()
  .setMinSupport(0.001)
  .setMaxPatternLength(2)

val model = prefixSpan.run(viewsPurchasesRddString)

val freqSequencesRdd = sc.parallelize(model.freqSequences.collect())

case class FreqSequences(views: Array[String], purchases: Array[String], support: Long)

val viewsPurchasesDf = freqSequencesRdd.map( fs =>
  {   
  val views = fs.sequence(0)(0)
  val purchases = fs.sequence(1)(0)
  val freq = fs.freq
  FreqSequences(views, purchases, freq)
  }
)
viewsPurchasesDf.toDF() // optional

When I try to run this, views and purchases are "Any" instead of "Array[String]". I've desperately tried to convert them around, but the best I get is Array[Any]. I think I need to map the contents to a String, I've tried e.g. this: How to get an element in WrappedArray: result of Dataset.select("x").collect()? and this: How to cast a WrappedArray[WrappedArray[Float]] to Array[Array[Float]] in spark (scala) and thousands of other Stackoverflow questions...

I really don't know how to solve this. I guess I'm already converting the initial dataframe/RDD to much, but can't understand where.

Answer 1

I think the problem is that you have a DataFrame, which retains no static type information. When you take an item out of a Row, you have to tell it explicitly which type you expect to get.

Untested, but inferred from the information you gave:

import scala.collection.mutable.WrappedArray

val viewsPurchasesRddString = viewsPurchasesGrouped.map( row =>
  Array(
    Array(row.getAs[WrappedArray[String]](1).toArray), 
    Array(row.getAs[WrappedArray[String]](2).toArray)
  )
)

Answer 2

I solved the problem. For reference, this works:

val viewsPurchasesRddString = viewsPurchasesGrouped.map( row =>
  Array(
  row.getSeq[Long](1).toArray, 
  row.getSeq[Long](2).toArray
  )
)

val prefixSpan = new PrefixSpan()
  .setMinSupport(0.001)
  .setMaxPatternLength(2)

val model = prefixSpan.run(viewsPurchasesRddString)

case class FreqSequences(views: Long, purchases: Long, frequence: Long)

val ps_frequences = model.freqSequences.filter(fs => fs.sequence.length > 1).map( fs =>
    {   
    val views = fs.sequence(0)(0)
    val purchases = fs.sequence(1)(0)
    val freq = fs.freq
    FreqSequences(views, purchases, freq)
    }
)

ps_frequences.toDF()