AWS Athena Nested JSON error - json

Question

I have a nested JSON file that looks like below:
\n \"total\" : 510,\n \"start\" : 0,\n \"count\" : 500,\n \"data\" : [ {\n \"id\" : 294,\n \"candidate\" : {\n \"id\" : 5275,\n \"firstName\" : \"bob\",\n \"lastName\" : \"bob\"\n },\n \"sendingUser\" : {\n \"id\" : 5,\n \"firstName\" : \"tom\",\n \"lastName\" : \"tom\"\n },\n \"dateAdded\" : 1487865908960,\n \"jobOrder\" : {\n \"id\" : 71,\n \"title\" : \"Job\"\n },\n \"status\" : \"1st Interview\",\n \"_score\" : 1.0\n }
I have this stored in S3 and am trying to create a table in AWS Athena, the editor I have done is below:
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS cvtest (
data struct < candidate struct <id string, firstName string, lastName string>,
sendingUser struct <id string, firstName string, lastName string>,
dateAdded string,
jobOrder string,
score string
>
)
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.openx.data.jsonserde.JsonSerDe'
LOCATION 's3://es-cvsent';
But the query runs into an error below;
FAILED: ParseException line 2:26 missing : at 'struct' near '<EOF>' line 2:37 missing : at 'string' near '<EOF>' line 2:55 missing : at 'string' near '<EOF>' line 2:72 missing : at 'string' near '<EOF>' line 3:28 missing : at 'struct' near '<EOF>' line 3:39 missing : at 'string' near '<EOF>' line 3:57 missing : at 'string' near '<EOF>' line 3:74 missing : at 'string' near '<EOF>' line 4:26 missing : at 'string' near '<EOF>' line 5:25 missing : at 'string' near '<EOF>' line 6:22 missing : at 'string' near '<EOF>'
This query ran against the "test" database, unless qualified by the query. Please post the error message on our forum or contact customer support with Query Id: 84e876e8-b947-490e-b2b6-7bf9c376266e.
Can anyone see what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

The data itself doesn't look like a valid JSON, but regardless of that you should be able to create a table because the underlying data is not validated at this point in time. (Just querying the table afterwards wouldn't work).
The problem you are having is that your syntax is wrong, see this documentation.":" is used between column and datatype within the struct definition.
This should work
data struct<candidate:struct<id:string, firstName:string, lastName:string>,
sendingUser:struct<id:string, firstName:string, lastName:string>,
dateAdded:string,
jobOrder:string,
score:string
>