How to properly express JPQL "join fetch" with "where" clause as JPA 2 CriteriaQuery?

In JPQL the same is actually true in the spec. The JPA spec does not allow an alias to be given to a fetch join. The issue is that you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with this by restricting the context of the join fetch. It is safer to join twice.

This is normally more an issue with ToMany than ToOnes. For example,

Select e from Employee e 
join fetch e.phones p 
where p.areaCode = '613'

This will incorrectly return all Employees that contain numbers in the '613' area code but will left out phone numbers of other areas in the returned list. This means that an employee that had a phone in the 613 and 416 area codes will loose the 416 phone number, so the object will be corrupted.

Granted, if you know what you are doing, the extra join is not desirable, some JPA providers may allow aliasing the join fetch, and may allow casting the Criteria Fetch to a Join.

I will show visually the problem, using the great example from James answer and adding the alternative solution.

When you do the follow query, without the FETCH:

Select e from Employee e 
join e.phones p 
where p.areaCode = '613'

You will have the follow results from Employee as you expected:

But when you add the FETCH clause on JOIN (FETCH JOIN), this is what happens:

The generated SQL is the same for the two queries, but the Hibernate removes on memory the 416 register when you use WHERE on the FETCH join.

So, to bring all phones and apply the WHERE correctly, you need to have two JOINs: one for the WHERE and another for the FETCH. Like:

Select e from Employee e 
join e.phones p 
join fetch e.phones      //no alias, to not commit the mistake
where p.areaCode = '613'