JMeter - Javascript and BeanScript woes

[wozencl]

Looking for a little help with JMeter and something I thought would be straight-foward but instead now has me stumped and annoyed !

I am trying to get particular part of a Date into a SOAP/XML Sampler. First I tried the BeanShell approach...

BeanShell PreProcessor

I added a BeanShell PreProcessor to my SOAP/XML Sampler with the following

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;

DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd");
Date date = new Date();

String theDate = (String) dateFormat.format(Date);

vars.put ("currentDate", theDate);

I then tried accessing the variable from my SOAP/XML request using ${currentDate} (stored in a User Defined Variables config element on the Thread Group).

Request:
<myTag>${currentDate} </myTag>

Response:
<myTag> </myTag>

No joy there... So I moved the Java to an external file and function (function.bsf) and tried:

BeanShell External File

Request:
<myTag>${__BeanShell(source("C:\function.bsf"))} </myTag>

Response:
<myTag> </myTag>

Again no joy!! So I moved onto to Javascript... But yet again nothing is returned.

Javascript

Request:
<myTag>${__javaScript("20120225".substring(4,4))} </myTag>
Response:
<myTag> </myTag>

Apologies for the weird formatting. As usual any help or guidance would be much appreciated!