title: Passing data back to Django view
body: <p>Inside of a table in my template I have the following which works great:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;tbody&gt;
  {% for item in items %}
  &lt;tr&gt;
      &lt;td&gt;{{ item.id }}&lt;/td&gt;
      &lt;td&gt;{{ item.name }}&lt;/td&gt;
      &lt;td&gt;{{ item.status }}&lt;/td&gt;
      &lt;td&gt;{{ item.start_time }}&lt;/td&gt;
      &lt;td&gt;{{ item.end_time }}&lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;/tbody&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I would like to add a form that posts the <code>items</code> to a view.  I've tried this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;form align="center" action="{% url 'app:doit' %}" method="post" &gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;/b&gt;
  {% csrf_token %}
      &lt;input type="hidden" name="items" value="{{ items}}" /&gt;
      &lt;input type="submit" name="export" value="Export" &gt;
  &lt;/form&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but that doesn't work as I expected it would. The data comes into the view as a sequence of characters, something like this, ",..." How do I pass <code>{{items}}</code> back to a view so I can process the items as python objects?</p>
  
  <p>The export method in my view contains this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>if 'items' in request.POST:
      my_items = request.POST['items']
  </code></pre>