Preferences nodes can be imported from a XML document. Importing is meant to be used in conjunction with the exporting functionality of Preferences, since it creates the correct corresponding XML documents.

The XML documents will remember whether they were exported from the user or system Preferences. Therefore, they can be imported into their respective Preferences trees again, without you having to figure out or know where they came from. The static function will automatically find out whether the XML document was exported from the user or system Preferences and will automatically import them into the tree they were exported from.

try (InputStream is = ...) {
    // This is a static call on the Preferences class
    Preferences.importPreferences(is);
} catch (IOException ioe) {
    // Exception whilst reading data from the InputStream
    ioe.printStackTrace();
} catch (InvalidPreferencesFormatException ipfe) {
    // Exception whilst parsing the XML document tree
    ipfe.printStackTrace();
}

InputStream is = null;
try {
    is = ...;
    // This is a static call on the Preferences class
    Preferences.importPreferences(is);
} catch (IOException ioe) {
    // Exception whilst reading data from the InputStream
    ioe.printStackTrace();
} catch (InvalidPreferencesFormatException ipfe) {
    // Exception whilst parsing the XML document tree
    ipfe.printStackTrace();
} finally {
    if (is != null) {
        try {
            is.close();
        } catch (IOException ignored) {}
    }
}