I’m going to echo Mark’s comments. You’re already using prompts for other things. Why not add Begin Date and End Date prompts? I realize that users have to be "protected from themselves 
" sometimes, but I don’t think asking them to enter dates correctly is too much to ask.
That said, if you’re wanting to understand the details of data providers and the SDK, check out this utility. The purpose of the utility is to copy a data provider, therefore it touches every part of a data provider. Review the code, and you can see how you might be able to adapt it to your purposes.
Dwayne Hoffpauir 
(BOB member since 2002-09-19)