You're trying to put a square peg into a round hole.
HTML Tables are row based, not column based. That makes selecting "columns" (which don't actually exist in the HTML) hard.
You could label the columns with columnClasses from DataTable, then write a JS selector (or use something like jQuery) that grabbed all the ids with that style class, then submitted that with jsf.ajax.request.
Or, you could use an Ajaxified DataTable that someone else already wrote, taking advantage of JSF's component based architecture...
Guess which one I'd do :-)
The only problem with using someone else's DataTable is that JSF 2.0 is so new I don't know that any framework is past the alpha stage of their 2.0 component set.
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