Converting String to XML

I am passing a a full XML representation as a string between two programs, Please how steps do i need to "cast" the String to an XML Element

When you say "cast" it implies that an xml element is a java type. I may be wrong but, in my experience, I always create an XML just like you'd create a String (appending tags and values as needed). I usually have all the values as fields in a class (CMRAll in my example) so I can loop through all the fields to create the element names and values using the Class class in a method I call "xmlIt". The result is a String with the entire xml structure, like this:

private String xmlIt(CMRAll cmrall) {
        String output = " ";
        output = " <?xml version=" + "\"1.0\" " + "encoding=\"iso-8859-1\" "
                + "?><cmr>";
        try {
            Class c = Class.forName("bis.cmr.CMRAll");
            Field[] fields = c.getFields();
            Field[] fieldval = cmrall.getClass().getFields();
            Field tempfield;
            String fieldvalue;
 
            for (int i = 0; i < fields.length; i++) {
                tempfield = c.getField(fields[i].getName());
                fieldvalue = (String) tempfield.get(cmrall);
                fieldvalue = prepareStringforXML(fieldvalue);
                if (fields[i].getName().equals("INVZIP")
                        || fields[i].getName().equals("INSZIP"))
                    fieldvalue = formatzip(fieldvalue);
                output = output + "<" + fields[i].getName() + ">" + fieldvalue
                        + "</" + fields[i].getName() + ">";
            }
 
        } catch (Exception ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
 
        }
 
        output = output + "</cmr> ";
 
        return output;
    }

I'm willing to listen to someone with a better idea since I am relatively new to creating xml from my code.

Have a look at JDom.
It's a very simple XML DOM API (Man that's a lot af TLA's )

You want to parse that String into a DOM, let's say?