JAXB: How to ignore namespace during unmarshalling XML document?

Here is an extension/edit of VonCs solution just in case someone doesn´t want to go through the hassle of implementing their own filter to do this. It also shows how to output a JAXB element without the namespace present. This is all accomplished using a SAX Filter.

Filter implementation:

import org.xml.sax.Attributes;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

import org.xml.sax.helpers.XMLFilterImpl;

public class NamespaceFilter extends XMLFilterImpl {

    private String usedNamespaceUri;
    private boolean addNamespace;

    //State variable
    private boolean addedNamespace = false;

    public NamespaceFilter(String namespaceUri,
            boolean addNamespace) {
        super();

        if (addNamespace)
            this.usedNamespaceUri = namespaceUri;
        else 
            this.usedNamespaceUri = "";
        this.addNamespace = addNamespace;
    }



    @Override
    public void startDocument() throws SAXException {
        super.startDocument();
        if (addNamespace) {
            startControlledPrefixMapping();
        }
    }



    @Override
    public void startElement(String arg0, String arg1, String arg2,
            Attributes arg3) throws SAXException {

        super.startElement(this.usedNamespaceUri, arg1, arg2, arg3);
    }

    @Override
    public void endElement(String arg0, String arg1, String arg2)
            throws SAXException {

        super.endElement(this.usedNamespaceUri, arg1, arg2);
    }

    @Override
    public void startPrefixMapping(String prefix, String url)
            throws SAXException {


        if (addNamespace) {
            this.startControlledPrefixMapping();
        } else {
            //Remove the namespace, i.e. don´t call startPrefixMapping for parent!
        }

    }

    private void startControlledPrefixMapping() throws SAXException {

        if (this.addNamespace && !this.addedNamespace) {
            //We should add namespace since it is set and has not yet been done.
            super.startPrefixMapping("", this.usedNamespaceUri);

            //Make sure we dont do it twice
            this.addedNamespace = true;
        }
    }

}

This filter is designed to both be able to add the namespace if it is not present:

new NamespaceFilter("http://www.example.com/namespaceurl", true);

and to remove any present namespace:

new NamespaceFilter(null, false);

The filter can be used during parsing as follows:

//Prepare JAXB objects
JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance("jaxb.package");
Unmarshaller u = jc.createUnmarshaller();

//Create an XMLReader to use with our filter
XMLReader reader = XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader();

//Create the filter (to add namespace) and set the xmlReader as its parent.
NamespaceFilter inFilter = new NamespaceFilter("http://www.example.com/namespaceurl", true);
inFilter.setParent(reader);

//Prepare the input, in this case a java.io.File (output)
InputSource is = new InputSource(new FileInputStream(output));

//Create a SAXSource specifying the filter
SAXSource source = new SAXSource(inFilter, is);

//Do unmarshalling
Object myJaxbObject = u.unmarshal(source);

To use this filter to output XML from a JAXB object, have a look at the code below.

//Prepare JAXB objects
JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance("jaxb.package");
Marshaller m = jc.createMarshaller();

//Define an output file
File output = new File("test.xml");

//Create a filter that will remove the xmlns attribute      
NamespaceFilter outFilter = new NamespaceFilter(null, false);

//Do some formatting, this is obviously optional and may effect performance
OutputFormat format = new OutputFormat();
format.setIndent(true);
format.setNewlines(true);

//Create a new org.dom4j.io.XMLWriter that will serve as the 
//ContentHandler for our filter.
XMLWriter writer = new XMLWriter(new FileOutputStream(output), format);

//Attach the writer to the filter       
outFilter.setContentHandler(writer);

//Tell JAXB to marshall to the filter which in turn will call the writer
m.marshal(myJaxbObject, outFilter);

This will hopefully help someone since I spent a day doing this and almost gave up twice 😉