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Hello, everyone!

I receive a Document (DOM tree) from a certain API (not in JDK). Sadly, this Document is not namespace-aware. As far as I know DOM, once generated, namespace-awareness can't be "added" afterwards.

When converting this Document using a Transformer to a string, the XML is correct. Elements have xmlns:... attributes and name prefixes. But from the DOM point of view, there are no namespaces and no prefixes.

I need to be able to convert this Document into a new Document which is namespace-aware. Yes, I could do this by just converting it to a string and back to DOM with namespaces enabled.

But: nodes of the original tree have user-objects set. Converting to string and back would make a mapping of these user-objects to the new Document very complicated, if not impossible. So I really need a way to convert non-namespace DOM to namespace DOM.

Are there any more-or-less straightforward solutions for this?

Worst case (what I'm hoping to avoid) would be to manually iterate through old Document tree and create new namespace-aware Node for each old Node. Doing so, one had to manually "parse" namespace prefixes, watch out for xmlns-attributes, and maintain a mapping between prefixes and namespace-URIs. Lots of things to go wrong.