Ajax event never fires in <p:inptText> when required="true"

In PrimeFaces when I use:

<p:inputText required="true"
             requiredMessage="message"
             value="#{backingBean.value}">

<p:ajax event="focus"
        update="infoText"
        listener="#{backingBean.something()}" />

</p:inputText>

The Ajax-event is never fired. However, if I remove the required="true" everything works fine and the event fires.

Can anyone tell me how to use p:inputText with p:ajax and required="true"?

This is probably occurring because when you gain focus to the text field an ajax event occurs that posts back the ViewState for the components on the page.

When it does this it is attempting to set the current value of the text field to #{backingBean.value} which is empty, causing a ValidatorException to be thrown. Because this validation error occurred the action event #{backingBean.something()} is never being fired.

Try adding the property immediate="true" to the <p:ajax> tag and see if that allows the event to fire before the validation phase.