DOMConfiguration improvements?

["Chintalapati, Shyam" <SC...@metasolv.com>]

I haven't subscribed to the development list.
So, I will post it here.

I am trying to subclass DOMConfigurator to 
add proprietary information in the configuration xml.

The subclass will parse this information and will
invoke the parse method of the superclass to do
the rest of the work.

What I find is that although the methods of DOMConfigurator
are protected for overriding, the attributes have
default package access only, making it impossible
to access them in the overridden methods of
doConfigure() and parse() methods. There are 
no public accessors for these attributes.
[repository, dfbKey].

Is subclassing not the right way to do this?
Should I be implementing a wrapper to achieve this
functionality?

many thanks,
-----
sam