using reflection with Class created in Cell

[asethia]

Hi,

I have a scenario; where I have configured a spark notebook with the dependent jar.

%%configure -f
{ "conf": {"spark.jars.packages": "<custom package>>",
           "spark.jars.repositories":"<<repo URL>>"
          }
}

The included jar has a function to get class Type using scala reflection. For example, the Person case class:

case class Person(name: String)

object Helper {
import scala.reflect.runtime.{universe => ru}
def getTypeFromStringClassName(name: String): ru.Type = {
  val classInstance: Class[_] = Class.forName(name)
  val mirror: ru.Mirror = ru.runtimeMirror(getClass.getClassLoader)
  val classSymbol: ru.ClassSymbol = mirror.classSymbol(classInstance)
  classSymbol.selfType
}
}

When I am trying to invoke this function from a Jupyter cell

Helper.getTypeFromStringClassName("Person")

It throws java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Person (wrong name: Person )

Suppose I include the case class (Person) part of the jar file and refer to it using spark.jar.packages, It works fine. The Spark executor cannot resolve the class from the class loader.