Let me know if you come up with a good solution, under time pressure, I've resorted to using a -edit_request block and then within that block manually setting the time widget's value with things like:
set v [template::util::date::create ... ]
template::element set_value my_form time_widget $v
In general, I've found the time templating stuff could use a good cleaning. I can't get year select boxes, they always are text boxes even if I don't specify the little "t".
