Dom4j : DocumentHelper.createDocument()

Got this error from a xml file created using the Dom4j API.

javax.xml.transform.TransformerException: com.sun.org.apache.xml.internal.utils.WrappedRuntimeException: The markup in the document preceding the root element must be well-formed.

We were missing the xml header in the file

<br /><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><br />

because we didn't call the DocumentHelper.createDocument() method!

import org.dom4j.Document; 
import org.dom4j.DocumentHelper;

Document document = DocumentHelper.createDocument();