I am now able to grab dates for all available layers in a bounding box and put into an array
Multiple layers, years table and click to identify working. Tested with one and multiple layers. Need to get sorting working and then move on.
Updated how updates are controlled to get auxillary attribtues into the database properly. 

Next step is to update the auxillary values on layers to match what's available in the database
Update to ensure that bounding box is recalculated on every update to the shorelines layer. Horrible, horrible hack due to weird Geoserver behavior when updating PostGIS views not updating the bounding boxes on the layer. Requires a manual update of the feature type :(