As per the comments on this closed issue, I'm opening a new issue, because sorting still doesn't work for aliases in all cases.

The regex patterns in org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.query.QueryUtils are not broad enough.

The FUNCTION_PATTERN in QueryUtils looks like this:

builder = new StringBuilder();
// any function call including parameters within the brackets
builder.append("\\w+\\s*\\([\\w\\.,\\s'=]+\\)");
// the potential alias
builder.append("\\s+[as|AS]+\\s+(([\\w\\.]+))");
FUNCTION_PATTERN = compile(builder.toString());

which only considers a single pair of parenthesis, but not two or more. So, for example, the earlierstBundleStart is not detected in this query:

SELECT DISTINCT(event.id) as id,
event.name as name,
event.top_event as topEvent,
event.ranking as ranking,
MIN(bundle.base_price_amount) as cheapestBundlePrice,
MIN(DATE(bundle.start)) as earliestBundleStart,
..

There was also a question on SO about this here, where many people state that they are facing the same issue.

There are and have been several issues (at least #1404, #1724, #1919) with the regex patterns in QueryUtils. I'm wondering, isn't there any more reliable way to parse the queries than with a regex (possibly an AST that is used also to execute the query)?

Edit: here's another closely related issue: #2079