jquery ajax request

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Hi all!!!

I am creating a registration form, which will allow users to select their username. So I have an ajax request which is supposed to return true or false if the name is available. For some reason what is being returned is the HTML of a page.

form code

Code:

<div id="registerFormContainer">
    
    &lt;?php
        $attributes = array(
            'id' => 'vendRegForm'
        );
        echo form_open_multipart('vendor/register_vendor',$attributes);
    ?&gt;
        
    &lt;input id="formType" name="formType" value="A" type="hidden"/&gt;
    &lt;input id="branchNum" name="branchNum" value="1" type="hidden"/&gt;
    
        <fieldset>
            <legend>Login Details</legend>
            <div class="row">
                <span class="label">Username:</span>
                <span class="formw">&lt;input id="username" name="username" type="text" /&gt;&lt;img id="scanVendUsrNameIcon" src="&lt;?php echo base_url();?&gt;assets/username_search.png"> <img id="resultIcon" src="&lt;?php echo base_url();?&gt;assets/username_tick.png"  class="hidden" /></span>
            </div>
            <div class="row">
                <span class="label">Password:</span>
                <span class="formw">&lt;input id="password" name="password" type="password" /&gt;&lt;/span>
            </div>
            <div class="row">
                <span class="label">Re-enter Password:</span>
                <span class="formw">&lt;input id="password2" name="password2" type="password" /&gt;&lt;/span>
            </div>
        </fieldset>

        <div class="row">
            <span class="label">&nbsp;</span>
            <span class="formw">&lt;input id="submitBtn" name="submitBtn" type="submit" value="Register" /&gt;&lt;/span>
        </div>
    &lt;/form&gt;

</div>

JS function

Code:

function verifyUsername(){

    var userData = {};
    userData['reqName'] = $('#username').val();
    
    $.ajax({
        url: '/index.php/ajax/verify_name',
        type: 'POST',
        data: {reqName: $('#username').val()},
        success: function(data, textStatus, jqXHR) {
                    alert('working ' + data);
                 },
        error: function(xmlhttp, status){
                    alert("logout failure ");
                }
    });
}
}

Controller function

Code:

function verify_name(){
        
        $this->load->model('vendor_model');
        $username = $this->input->post('reqName');
        if($this->vendor_model->verify_name_availability($username)){
            echo '1';
        }
    }

Model

Code:

function verify_name_availability($reqName){
        $this->db->where('username', $reqName);
        $res = $this->db->get('vendorpasswords');

        if($res->num_rows == 1){
            return false;
        }else{
            return true;
        }
    }