No I am not using partial updates. The button action is set to full update and it runs one line of server-side javascript that sets one of the requestScope variables to true.
The XPage is a form with fields bound to requestscope variables and a button. The buttons sets a requestScope variable to true and search results from SQL database are displayed. To facilitate a search from live text action and from excel I wanted to employ urlParameters. This works fine, but subsequent searches still use the value from the urlParameter rather than the values entered into the form.