[jira] [Created] (SPARK-12526) `ifelse`, `when`, `otherwise` unable to take Column as value

["Sen Fang (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Sen Fang created SPARK-12526:
--------------------------------

             Summary: `ifelse`, `when`, `otherwise` unable to take Column as value
                 Key: SPARK-12526
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-12526
             Project: Spark
          Issue Type: Bug
          Components: SparkR
    Affects Versions: 1.5.2, 1.6.0
            Reporter: Sen Fang


When passing a Column to {{ifelse}}, {{when}}, {{otherwise}}, it will error out with

{code}
attempt to replicate an object of type 'environment'
{code}

The problems lies in the use of base R {{ifelse}} function, which is vectorized version of {{if ... else ...}} idiom, but it is unable to replicate a Column's job id as it is an environment.

Considering {{callJMethod}} was never designed to be vectorized, the safe option is to replace {{ifelse}} with {{if ... else ...}} instead. However technically this is inconsistent to base R's ifelse, which is meant to be vectorized.

I can send a PR for review first and discuss further if there is scenario at all when `ifelse`, `when`, `otherwise` would be used vectorizedly.

A dummy example is:
{code}
ifelse(lit(1) == lit(1), lit(2), lit(3))
{code}
A concrete example might be:
{code}
ifelse(df$mpg > 0, df$mpg, 0)
{code}




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