How to create an empty DataFrame? Why “ValueError: RDD is empty”?

Question

I am trying to create an empty dataframe in Spark (Pyspark).

I am using similar approach to the one discussed here enter link description here, but it is not working.

Answer 1

import pyspark
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
from pyspark.sql.types import StructType,StructField, StringType

spark = SparkSession.builder.appName('SparkPractice').getOrCreate()

schema = StructType([
  StructField('firstname', StringType(), True),
  StructField('middlename', StringType(), True),
  StructField('lastname', StringType(), True)
  ])

df = spark.createDataFrame(spark.sparkContext.emptyRDD(),schema)
df.printSchema()