CodeIgniter Button does not Trigger Action - php

Question

I have been searching through various questions on the site with no luck. The closest I got to an answer, as far as I can tell, was through the following question: CodeIgniter's form action is not working properly.
The problem is that when I press the login button nothing happens so the action property in the HTML form is not being triggered. I have looked at my routes as well with no luck.
The HTML code is in my view folder and is the following:
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 col-md-offset-4">
<div class="login-panel panel panel-default">
<div class="panel-body">
<form role="form" method="post" action="<?php echo base_url() ?>index.php/login">
<fieldset>
<div class="form-group">
<input class="form-control" placeholder="Username" name="username" type="username" required>
</div>
<div class="form-group">
<input class="form-control" placeholder="Password" name="password" type="password" required>
</div>
<a type="submit" id="login-button" style="navy" class="btn btn-lg btn-success btn-block">Login</a>
</fieldset>
</form>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
My controller is called pages.php, and it's function, login is the following:
public function login()
{
$this->load->helper('form');
$username = $this->input->post('username');
$password = $this->input->post('password');
if ($username != false && $password != false)
{
$loginDetails = $this->pages_model->retrieveLoginDetails($username, $password);
if ($loginDetails != false)
{
if ($loginDetails['username'] == $username && $loginDetails['password'] == $password)
{
$this->load->view ('home');
}
else
{
$this->view();
echo "details dont match";
}
}
else
{
$this->view();
echo "nothing received from db";
}
}
else
{
$this->view();
echo "no details entered";
}
}
I am only concerned with going to the home page. By calling the view function I am just returning to the login screen. I will adjust the naming appropriately once I can get this to work. The pages model contains the following function to retrieve the login data from the database:
public function retrieveLoginDetails ($username, $password)
{
$loginDetails['username'] = $this->db->get_where('user_details', $username);
if (! empty ($loginDetails['username']))
{
$loginDetails['password'] = $this->db->get_where('user_details', $password);
return $loginDetails;
}
return false;
}
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Use
<input type="submit" value="Login" class="btn btn-lg btn-success btn-block" />
In place of
<a type="submit" id="login-button" style="navy" class="btn btn-lg btn-success btn-block">Login</a>
To know more check out this : http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_a.asp

Answer 2

I don't know direct anwser, but did you check what exactly is your server returning and where are data beeing sent. LiteBug FTW ;)
If there isn't any data beeing sent, you should probally check your .js files.