I'm knee deep in some Seam/A4J fun and have hit a road block. Is it possible to have A4J refresh the value of a component without going through Apply Request Values?

The attached code demonstrates what I'm trying to accomplish. I'd like to see changes (made outside this form in a different browser) to a person's Manager ID by clicking the the refresh button (cmdRefresh). In a typical web application, I would just have my users refresh the page to view changes but since it's AJAX, I'm essentially looking for is a way to mark a component as read-only for a given AJAX request.

Does this even make sense?

<h:form id="DummyForm">
 <h:selectOneMenu id="lstDestination" value="#{BackingBean.managerId}" >
 <f:selectItems value="#{Util.selectItems}" />
 </h:selectOneMenu>
 <a4j:commandButton id="cmdRefresh" value="Refresh" reRender="lstDestination" />
 <a4j:commandButton id="cmdSave" value="Refresh" actionListener="#{BackingBean.save}" />
</h:form>


public class Person {

 private String name;
 private String phone;
 private Long managerId;

 public Long getManagerId() {
 return managerId;
 }

 public void setManagerId(Long managerId) {
 this.managerId = managerId;
 }

}

public class BackingBean {

 Person person;

 public void setManagerId(Long managerId) {
 this.person.setManagerId(managerId);
 }

 public Long getManagerId() {
 return this.person.getManagerId();
 }

}