There is a XSLT based solution to merge two XMl documents adhering to same DTD. It uses docuement() function. Though docuemtn fucntion can understand relative URI while picking the XMl files , it doesnt seem to work when xml files and code running is packaged inside a jar file. Does anybody know how to do it. That is to merge two XML files at run time when XML files to be merged are packaged inside a jar file?