If I understand you correctly, you want to better understand the sequence of events between the presentation layer (Javascript) and the managed beans.

This post from the Prime Faces blog explains the workings of callback Ajax events oncomplete , onsuccess and onstart .

The general order would be as follows:

• onstart : start event of the request that executes a javascript.
• actionListener : updates properties in manabed bean .
• action : performs specified action of manabed bean .
• onsuccess / onerror : javascript events executed if there was success or error in action, respectively.
• update : Updates DOM components to reflect actions performed via javascript, but can call methods used by updated components via postback .
• oncomplete : javascript event executed after everything was completed, with error or not

About action and actionListener

A action is the action where business rules will effectively execute, usually culminating in navigation. The action method usually returns a String.

actionListener is like an event occurring before action in order to update values, perform some validation, log, etc. You can still cancel the action if necessary. In actionLisener , you can access the values sent by the user through the parameter ActionEvent before that JSF update the properties of ManagedBean .

I've seen some developers mistakenly access properties of ManagedBean in the actionListener event and write them to the database. Only then do they realize that the values are out of order.