Hibernate doesn't support accessing fields on usertypes for projection criterias?

My Classes:

public class User 
{
   @Type(type="AccountType")
   private AccountType accountType;
}

public class AccountType 
{
   private String name;

   private AccountType(String name)
   {
      this.name = name;
   }

   public static AccountType User = new AccountType("User");
   public static AccountType Administrator = new AccountType("Administrator");
}

I also have a properly setup AccountTypeUserType.

My Query:

List results = session.createCriteria(User.class)
   .setProjection(Projections.projectionList()
      .add(Projections.property("accountType.name"), "accountType)
   )
   .setResultTransformer(Transformer.aliasToBean(UserSummary.class))
   .list()

The problem I run into is that my query fails with...

org.hibernate.QueryException: could not resolve property: accountType.name of: com.huskyenergy.routecommander.domain.rtc.User

Oh and you cannot .createAlias("accountType", "at") either because accountType is not an association.

Any thoughts?

As you probably realized, an UserType is not an entity. The best way to see why you can't access a property in an UserType is to use URL as the example. You won't do a query asking for URL.host, but for URL itself. That's why an UserType should know how to transform a String into an Object, and an Object into String, for instance. So, you'll have to use something like this:

.add(Projections.property("accountType.name"), AccountType.User)

Look at this UserType example and the test case for it from the test suite.

But I think the real question is why you are not using an Enum (and @Enumerated), instead of this UserType. I think that an Enum is a better fit, as it's internally an UserType, but it's "native" to Hibernate.