How to deal with Spark UDF input/output of primitive nullable type

Question

The issues:

1) Spark doesn't call UDF if input is column of primitive type that contains null:

inputDF.show()

+-----+
|  x  |
+-----+
| null|
|  1.0|
+-----+

inputDF
  .withColumn("y",
     udf { (x: Double) => 2.0 }.apply($"x") // will not be invoked if $"x" == null
  )
  .show()

+-----+-----+
|  x  |  y  |
+-----+-----+
| null| null|
|  1.0|  2.0|
+-----+-----+

2) Can't produce null from UDF as a column of primitive type:

udf { (x: String) => null: Double } // compile error

Answer 1

Accordingly to the docs:

Note that if you use primitive parameters, you are not able to check if it is null or not, and the UDF will return null for you if the primitive input is null. Use boxed type or [[Option]] if you wanna do the null-handling yourself.

So, the easiest solution is just to use boxed types if your UDF input is nullable column of primitive type OR/AND you need to output null from UDF as a column of primitive type:

inputDF
  .withColumn("y",
     udf { (x: java.lang.Double) => 
       (if (x == null) 1 else null): java.lang.Integer
     }.apply($"x")
  )
  .show()

+-----+-----+
|  x  |  y  |
+-----+-----+
| null| null|
|  1.0|  2.0|
+-----+-----+

Answer 2

I would also use Artur's solution, but there is also another way without using javas wrapper classes by using struct:

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.struct
import org.apache.spark.sql.Row

inputDF
  .withColumn("y",
     udf { (r: Row) => 
       if (r.isNullAt(0)) Some(1) else None
     }.apply(struct($"x"))
  )
  .show()

Answer 3

Based on the solution provided at SparkSQL: How to deal with null values in user defined function? by @zero323, an alternative way to achieve the requested result is:

import scala.util.Try
val udfHandlingNulls udf((x: Double) => Try(2.0).toOption)
inputDF.withColumn("y", udfHandlingNulls($"x")).show()