Spark sql how to explode without losing null values

Following up on the accepted answer, when the array elements are a complex type it can be difficult to define it by hand (e.g with large structs).

To do it automatically I wrote the following helper method:

  def explodeOuter(df: Dataset[Row], columnsToExplode: List[String]) = {
      val arrayFields = df.schema.fields
          .map(field => field.name -> field.dataType)
          .collect { case (name: String, type: ArrayType) => (name, type.asInstanceOf[ArrayType])}
          .toMap

      columnsToExplode.foldLeft(df) { (dataFrame, arrayCol) =>
      dataFrame.withColumn(arrayCol, explode(when(size(col(arrayCol)) =!= 0, col(arrayCol))
        .otherwise(array(lit(null).cast(arrayFields(arrayCol).elementType)))))    
 }

Edit: it seems that spark 2.2 and newer have this built in.

Spark 2.2+

You can use explode_outer function:

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.explode_outer

df.withColumn("likes", explode_outer($"likes")).show

// +---+----+--------+
// | id|name|   likes|
// +---+----+--------+
// |  1|Luke|baseball|
// |  1|Luke|  soccer|
// |  2|Lucy|    null|
// +---+----+--------+

Spark <= 2.1

In Scala but Java equivalent should be almost identical (to import individual functions use import static).

import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.{array, col, explode, lit, when}

val df = Seq(
  (1, "Luke", Some(Array("baseball", "soccer"))),
  (2, "Lucy", None)
).toDF("id", "name", "likes")

df.withColumn("likes", explode(
  when(col("likes").isNotNull, col("likes"))
    // If null explode an array<string> with a single null
    .otherwise(array(lit(null).cast("string")))))

The idea here is basically to replace NULL with an array(NULL) of a desired type. For complex type (a.k.a structs) you have to provide full schema:

val dfStruct = Seq((1L, Some(Array((1, "a")))), (2L, None)).toDF("x", "y")

val st =  StructType(Seq(
  StructField("_1", IntegerType, false), StructField("_2", StringType, true)
))

dfStruct.withColumn("y", explode(
  when(col("y").isNotNull, col("y"))
    .otherwise(array(lit(null).cast(st)))))

or

dfStruct.withColumn("y", explode(
  when(col("y").isNotNull, col("y"))
    .otherwise(array(lit(null).cast("struct<_1:int,_2:string>")))))

Note:

If array Column has been created with containsNull set to false you should change this first (tested with Spark 2.1):

df.withColumn("array_column", $"array_column".cast(ArrayType(SomeType, true)))

You can use explode_outer() function.