Hi George,
Not sure if I fullt understood your problem... I believe you your component name was '02/1/2015' and you were getting an error because of this? If so, my recomendation is that you create your component name as '20150102' (date format) and on col_decription you just use write statement to foprmat:
write col_name into col_desc DD/MM/YYYY
Regards,
Custodio