A major flaw of the Criteria query API is its inability to perform table self-joins, such as querying tables that implement, for example, nested sets.

Specifically, criteria queries cannot emit queries of form:


Assuming it is still the case that Criteria cannot do self-joins, and there are no workarounds that don't involve faking the self-join through a VIEW that performs the self-join -- I would like to add this functionality to Hibernate, because queries of this type appear throughout our app.

The Criterion query tree data structure captures the self-join fine so the loss of the self-joined alias appears to be happening in the CriteriaLoader phase.

Any devs familar with the source of the query generation engine able to provide some pointers or explain the self-join limitation?

cheers.

anyone?