How?

Shape your data as NamedTuple or dataclasses - they can freely mix:

from dataclasses import dataclass
from tinsel import struct, transform
from typing import NamedTuple, Optional, Dict, List

@struct
@dataclass
class UserInfo:
    hobby: List[str]
    last_seen: Optional[int]
    pet_ages: Dict[str, int]


@struct
class User(NamedTuple):
    login: str
    age: int
    active: bool
    info: Optional[UserInfo]

Transform root node (User in our case) into schema:

schema = transform(User)

Create some data, if necessary:

data = [
    User(
        login="Ben",
        age=18,
        active=False,
        info=None
    ),
    User(
        login="Tom",
        age=32,
        active=True,
        info=UserInfo(
            hobby=["pets", "flowers"],
            last_seen=16,
            pet_ages={"Jack": 2, "Sunshine": 6}
        )
    )
]

And… voilà!:

from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

sc = SparkSession.builder.master('local').getOrCreate()

df = sc.createDataFrame(data=data, schema=schema)
df.printSchema()
df.show(truncate=False)

This will output:

root
 |-- login: string (nullable = false)
 |-- age: integer (nullable = false)
 |-- active: boolean (nullable = false)
 |-- info: struct (nullable = true)
 |    |-- hobby: array (nullable = false)
 |    |    |-- element: string (containsNull = false)
 |    |-- last_seen: integer (nullable = true)
 |    |-- pet_ages: map (nullable = false)
 |    |    |-- key: string
 |    |    |-- value: integer (valueContainsNull = false)


+-----+---+------+----------------------------------------------+
|login|age|active|info                                          |
+-----+---+------+----------------------------------------------+
|Ben  |18 |false |null                                          |
|Tom  |32 |true  |[[pets, flowers],, [Jack -> 2, Sunshine -> 6]]|
+-----+---+------+----------------------------------------------+

Features

• use native python types; no extra DSL, no cryptic API — just plain Python;

• small and fast;

• provide type shims for some types absent in Python, like long or short;

• nullable fields naturally fits into schema definition;

Credits

This package was created with Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template.

0.2.0 (2018-08-28)

• Added dataclasses support

0.1.0 (2018-08-28)

• First release on PyPI.