org.openx.data.jsonserde.json.JSONArray cannot be cast to org.openx.data.jsonserde.json.JSONObject

[furmangg]

My JSON is usually this format:

            {
                "value": {
                    "US": 89,
                    "KR": 1
                },
                "end_time": "2015-07-01T07:00:00+0000"
            }

But sometimes Facebook makes value an empty array not a map:

            {
                "value": [],
                "end_time": "2015-07-01T07:00:00+0000"
            }

If I declare my table as a map as follows:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS mytable (
  value:map<string,int>,
  end_time:string
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.openx.data.jsonserde.JsonSerDe'
STORED AS TEXTFILE 
LOCATION 'my location';

Then I get the error:
org.openx.data.jsonserde.json.JSONArray cannot be cast to org.openx.data.jsonserde.json.JSONObject

I would prefer you provide a way to flag this issue as ignorable. I'd prefer not to ignore the entire json file, but just rather null out that particular value. And ignore.malformed.json=true doesn't skip this error anyway.

Another possible fix would be to implement a uniontype complex type so I could declare that it could be an array or a map.

[rcongiu]

Mm...making it ignore an empty array should not be hard to do. I want to code support for union types too since several people have been asking for it.