Did you know ADF Faces allows you to submit only part of a page? This can be useful when you have a search box on a page and only want to submit that one component when the user clicks the search button.

The ADF Faces af:subForm component represents an independently submittable region of a page. When used within an af:form tag or within an JSF HTML h:form tag, af:subForm lets you control which components should be validated and pushed into the model without having to use multiple forms on a page.

See the following for more information on ADF subForms.