Parse and output XML document while preserving attribute order

Question

QUESTION: How can I take in an element with attributes from an XML and output the same element and attributes while preserving the order of those attributes?
The following code will parse and XML document and generate (practically) unchanged output. However, all attributes are ordered a-z
Example: The following element
<work_item_type work_item_db_site="0000000000000000" work_item_db_id="0" work_item_type_code="3" user_tag_ident="Step" name="Work Step" gmt_last_updated="2008-12-31T18:00:00.000000000" last_upd_db_site="0000000000000000" last_upd_db_id="0" rstat_type_code="1">
</work_item_type>is output as:
<work_item_type gmt_last_updated="2008-12-31T18:00:00.000000000" last_upd_db_id="0" last_upd_db_site="0000000000000000" name="Work Step" rstat_type_code="1" user_tag_ident="Step" work_item_db_id="0" work_item_db_site="0000000000000000" work_item_type_code="3">
</work_item_type>As you may notice, there is no difference in these besides order of the attributes!
I am convened that the problem is not in the stylesheet.xslt but if you are not then it is posted bellow.
Please, someone help me out with this! I have a feeling the solution is simple
The following take the XML from source.xml and outputs it to DEST_filename with attributes in a-z order
Code:
private void OutputFile(String DEST_filename, String style_filename){
     //StreamSource stylesheet = new StreamSource(style_filename);
     try{
          File dest_file = new File(DEST_filename);
          if(!dest_file.exists())
              dest_file.createNewFile();
          TransformerFactory tranFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
          Transformer aTransformer = tranFactory.newTransformer();
          aTransformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.ENCODING, "UTF-8");
          Source src = new DOMSource("source.xml");
          Result dest = new StreamResult(dest_file);
          aTransformer.transform(src, dest);
          System.out.println("Finished");
     catch(Exception e){
          System.err.print(e);
          System.exit(-1);
    }

Answer 1

You can't. The reason is, the XML Recommendation explicitly says the order of attributes is not significant. Therefore conforming XML serializers won't treat it as if it were significant.
If you have an environment where you think that the order of attributes is significant, your first step should be to reconsider. Possibly it isn't really significant and you are over-reaching in some way. Or possibly someone writing requirements is ignorant of this fact and the requirement can be discarded.
Or possibly your output is being given to somebody else who has a defective parser which expects the attributes to be in a particular order. You could quote the XML Recommendation to those people but often XML bozos are resistant to change. If you're stuck writing for that parser then you'll have to apply some non-XML processing to your output to fix it up on their behalf.