Java transform problem - resulting XML has wrong namespace on imported Node

Question

I use Document.importNode(Node, String) to import a node from one document into another document. I want to preserve the namespace of the imported node. This works ok if the imported node specifies xmlns, even xmlns="". But if the imported node does not specify a namespace, I would expect the resulting serialized XML to have xmlns="". However, this is not the case. I use javax.xml.transform.Transformer when I serialize the XML. After the transform, the imported node has the namespace of the document it is imported into, which we do not want. So how do I get the imported node to serialize out with xmlns="", even if it's not specified in the source document? I am using javax.xml.transform.* and javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder from Java 1.4.2.
Example of XML that node is imported into (imported node replaces PayloadPlaceHolder):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Envelope envelopeVersion="0.0.0" classificationLevel="Unclassified" xmlns="http://disa.gcss.mil/XMLGateway/Envelope">
<Header>
<UID>GM0000001</UID>
<DateTime>2006-12-05T16:11:50Z</DateTime>
</Header>
<Status reason="FAILED" lastTransactionID="9999999999" inReplyTo="ZZZ9999999999">
<LastMessageUID>ZZZ9999999999</LastMessageUID>
</Status>
<Payload>
<PayloadPlaceHolder>
</PayloadPlaceHolder>
</Payload>]
</Envelope>
Example of XML with null namespace, test_segment is imported node:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<test_segment>
<name>test</name>
</test_segment>
Example of result XML with imported node (test_segment):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Envelope classificationLevel="Unclassified" envelopeVersion="0.0.0" xmlns="http://disa.gcss.mil/XMLGateway/Envelope">
<Header>
<UID>GM0000001</UID>
<DateTime>2006-12-05T16:11:50Z</DateTime>
</Header>
<Status inReplyTo="ZZZ9999999999" lastTransactionID="9999999999" reason="FAILED">
<LastMessageUID>ZZZ9999999999</LastMessageUID>
</Status>
<Payload>
<test_segment>
<name>test</name>
</test_segment>
</Payload>
</Envelope>
Here is the code to build the documents and transform the XML:
     Document document = null;
Document dataBlockDoc = null;
ByteArrayInputStream inStream = new ByteArrayInputStream
(StringUtils.getBytes(xml.toString()));
try {
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
dbf.setNamespaceAware( true );
DocumentBuilder parser = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
document =
parser.parse(
new InputSource(inStream ) );
if (dataBlock != null) {
inStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(StringUtils.getBytes(dataBlock));
dataBlockDoc = parser.parse(
new InputSource(inStream ) );
Element root = document.getDocumentElement();
Element payload = null;
NodeList children = root.getChildNodes();
//get Payload child from envelope document
for (int i = 0; i < children.getLength(); i++) {
if (children.item(i).getNodeName().equals("Payload")) {
payload = (Element)children.item(i);
break;
//get the PayloadPlaceHolder
Element payloadPlaceHolderElement = null;
children = payload.getChildNodes();
for (int i = 0; i < children.getLength(); i++) {
if (children.item(i).getNodeName().equals("PayloadPlaceHolder")) {
payloadPlaceHolderElement = (Element)children.item(i);
break;
Node newPayload = null;
if (dataBlockDoc != null) {
Element dataBlockElement = dataBlockDoc.getDocumentElement();
//make new Payload element to replace old (empty) Payload
newPayload = document.importNode((Node) dataBlockElement, true);
payload.replaceChild(newPayload, payloadPlaceHolderElement);
else
payload.removeChild(payloadPlaceHolderElement);
TransformerFactory tf = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer nullTransform = tf.newTransformer();
ByteArrayOutputStream oStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
nullTransform.transform(                    new DOMSource( document ),
     new StreamResult( oStream ) );
xml = new StringBuffer(oStream.toString());
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It appears that the problem is that the DOM serializer implementation in JDK 1.4 is not properly handling namespaces. Does anyone know of a workaround or alternate serializers we could use to serialize a DOM tree? I also need it to work with XSLT.
Thanks.