Bring featured articles to the front of the articles retrieved by ArticlesModel

Question

How can I bring the featured articles to the front of the articles array retrieved by the ArticlesModel?

I know I can change the ordering via this line:

$model->setState('list.ordering', $ordering);

But that is for example on the publish up or down string. But how can I bring the featured articles to the front?

Is that possible with the model or do I just need to loop through the array, and manually bring these items to the front?

Answer 1

Order by featured column and use descending direction:

$model->setState('list.ordering', 'a.featured');
$model->setState('list.direction', 'DESC');

Answer 2

You could use filter.featured=1 to select just the filtered articles and then select the non featured articles and combine the arrays.