I apologize up front because I am sure this simple question has been asked but I have been unable to find it.
The way I have been doing partial submit in JSF is by ajaxifying the input fields of interest and providing getters and setters for each. So the user inputs something in field A and moves to field B, an ajax message is sent to update the backing bean for field A, and this repeats until the user clicks Submit. The form fields are "bound" to the corresponding backing bean fields. The Submit commandButton uses "process=" to limit submitted data to the fields of interest and the actionListener now processes the already-updated fields in the backing bean.
In some cases, this approach is fine because I want to know (in the backing bean) what the user entered BEFORE submit, perhaps for immediate validation in the backing bean. In other cases I don't care until AFTER submit, and this seems a lot of unnecessary traffic and code. I'd like to omit all those getters and setter and ajax on the input fields, and just use the ajax commandButton, processing only the fields I select with "process=". My problem is I don't know how to collect the submitted form data in the actionListener method like in a traditional form submit where I get the form field values directly from the request object. Is this possible? I'm using Primefaces.