I've added a datapicker to the my page that will return a range of dates. on the page the date picker
shows my data as I had setup in the control for yymmdd which is perfect. where I was falling down was where I had in the value of the control ${mydatepickrange} whose value I send to my webservice.
Don't take my comments above as criticism of the product as i'm still learning on how to use it, but since I saw the selected date value in the format that I specified I thought I would be able to get that value directly.