Mark Collette added a comment - 22/Mar/12 10:35 AM IsResourceRequest() does look like a good hook to handle the multi-part stream, without any side effects of the lifecycle interfering, since it is before the lifecycle: Although this does seem like a nice hook for running as soon as possible, since it comes before Lifecycle.execute even happens: FacesServlet.service { // Acquire the FacesContext instance for this request FacesContext context = facesContextFactory.getFacesContext (servletConfig.getServletContext(), request, response, lifecycle); // Execute the request processing lifecycle for this request try { ResourceHandler handler = context.getApplication().getResourceHandler(); if (handler.isResourceRequest(context)) { handler.handleResourceRequest(context); } else { lifecycle.execute(context); lifecycle.render(context); } But in case there is a problem that we're processing things outside/before the lifecycle, there might be a more surgical alteration we could try. If we change AutoUpdateCallbackPartialViewContext and RequestContext so that the DefaultRequestContext instance is lazily set, instead of in AutoUpdateCallbackPartialViewContext's constructor, so that AutoUpdateCallbackPartialViewContext.isAjaxRequest() is not called until later, then maybe that will solve this issue. All the methods in these classes seem to only be needed in ApplyRequestValuesPhase and after. And FileEntryPhaseListener is a little touchy in needing some of this stuff to not be invoked yet in RestoreViewPhase.