Django returning dictionary from front end?

Question

I'm passing a dictionary from the front end to the back end in one of my Django views. The setup is something like this:

$.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: '/my/url',
        data: {
            'patients': '{{ appointments.appointments.items }}'
        },
        dataType: 'json',
                async: false,
        success: function (data) {
              console.log("yay")
        }
      });

which is passing back an dictionary of names, etc. and I'm then retrieving this on the python backend, like so:

if request.method == "POST":
    patients = request.POST.get("patients", None)
    print("patients are", patients)

However, when I do this and print out the patients dict() instead of getting an actual dictionary, I get a string like this:

dict_items([(153, {'person': 'Samuel', 'time': datetime.datetime(2021, 4, 22, 17, 0, tzinfo=<UTC>), 'number': 'First'})])

that doesn't follow the dictionary format/even really allow for json parsing etc.

Is there something I'm doing wrong here? The {{appointments.appointments.items}} is just passed into my HTML template page from the backend during the get request and I'm accessing it with JavaScript in the same file.

Any advice here would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I think, it can be solved by adding Eval Method.

patients = eval(request.POST.get("patients", None))