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Legacy arbitrary stateful operators

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Note

Databricks recommends using transformWithState to build custom stateful applications. See Build a custom stateful application.

This article has information for features that support mapGroupsWithState, and flatMapGroupsWithState. For more details on these operators, see link.

Specify initial state for mapGroupsWithState

You can specify a user-defined initial state for Structured Streaming stateful processing using flatMapGroupsWithStateor mapGroupsWithState. This allows you to avoid reprocessing data when starting a stateful stream without a valid checkpoint.

def mapGroupsWithState[S: Encoder, U: Encoder](
    timeoutConf: GroupStateTimeout,
    initialState: KeyValueGroupedDataset[K, S])(
    func: (K, Iterator[V], GroupState[S]) => U): Dataset[U]

def flatMapGroupsWithState[S: Encoder, U: Encoder](
    outputMode: OutputMode,
    timeoutConf: GroupStateTimeout,
    initialState: KeyValueGroupedDataset[K, S])(
    func: (K, Iterator[V], GroupState[S]) => Iterator[U])

Example use case that specifies an initial state to the flatMapGroupsWithState operator:

val fruitCountFunc =(key: String, values: Iterator[String], state: GroupState[RunningCount]) => {
  val count = state.getOption.map(_.count).getOrElse(0L) + valList.size
  state.update(new RunningCount(count))
  Iterator((key, count.toString))
}

val fruitCountInitialDS: Dataset[(String, RunningCount)] = Seq(
  ("apple", new RunningCount(1)),
  ("orange", new RunningCount(2)),
  ("mango", new RunningCount(5)),
).toDS()

val fruitCountInitial = initialState.groupByKey(x => x._1).mapValues(_._2)

fruitStream
  .groupByKey(x => x)
  .flatMapGroupsWithState(Update, GroupStateTimeout.NoTimeout, fruitCountInitial)(fruitCountFunc)

Example use case that specifies an initial state to the mapGroupsWithState operator:

val fruitCountFunc =(key: String, values: Iterator[String], state: GroupState[RunningCount]) => {
  val count = state.getOption.map(_.count).getOrElse(0L) + valList.size
  state.update(new RunningCount(count))
  (key, count.toString)
}

val fruitCountInitialDS: Dataset[(String, RunningCount)] = Seq(
  ("apple", new RunningCount(1)),
  ("orange", new RunningCount(2)),
  ("mango", new RunningCount(5)),
).toDS()

val fruitCountInitial = initialState.groupByKey(x => x._1).mapValues(_._2)

fruitStream
  .groupByKey(x => x)
  .mapGroupsWithState(GroupStateTimeout.NoTimeout, fruitCountInitial)(fruitCountFunc)

Test the mapGroupsWithState update function

The TestGroupState API enables you to test the state update function used for Dataset.groupByKey(...).mapGroupsWithState(...) and Dataset.groupByKey(...).flatMapGroupsWithState(...).

The state update function takes the previous state as input using an object of type GroupState. See the Apache Spark GroupState reference documentation. For example:

import org.apache.spark.sql.streaming._
import org.apache.spark.api.java.Optional

test("flatMapGroupsWithState's state update function") {
  var prevState = TestGroupState.create[UserStatus](
    optionalState = Optional.empty[UserStatus],
    timeoutConf = GroupStateTimeout.EventTimeTimeout,
    batchProcessingTimeMs = 1L,
    eventTimeWatermarkMs = Optional.of(1L),
    hasTimedOut = false)

  val userId: String = ...
  val actions: Iterator[UserAction] = ...

  assert(!prevState.hasUpdated)

  updateState(userId, actions, prevState)

  assert(prevState.hasUpdated)
}