Shuyi Chen created FLINK-9430: --------------------------------- Summary: Support Casting of Object to Primitive types for Flink SQL UDF Key: FLINK-9430 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLINK-9430 Project: Flink Issue Type: New Feature Components: Table API & SQL Reporter: Shuyi Chen Assignee: Shuyi Chen
We want to add a SQL UDF to access specific element in a JSON string using JSON path. However, the JSON element can be of different types, e.g. Int, Float, Double, String, Boolean and etc.. Since return type is not part of the method signature, we can not use overload. So we will end up writing a UDF for each type, e.g. GetFloatFromJSON, GetIntFromJSON and etc., which has a lot of duplication. One way to unify all these UDF functions is to implement one UDF and return java.lang.Object, and in the SQL statement, use CAST AS to cast the returned Object into the correct type. Below is an example: {code:java} object JsonPathUDF extends ScalarFunction { def eval(jsonStr: String, path: String): Object = { JSONParser.parse(jsonStr).read(path) } }{code} {code:java} SELECT CAST(jsonpath(json, "$.store.book.title") AS VARCHAR(32)) as bookTitle FROM table1{code} I have already got a local branch working. Please comment if there are alternatives. -- This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v7.6.3#76005)