Grails Self Referencing Criteria

Question

In the project I´m working there is a part of the database that is like the following diagram

The domain classes have a definition similar to the following:

class File{
    String name
}

class Document{
    File file
}

class LogEntry{
    Document document
    Date date
}

First I need to get only the latest LogEntry for all Documents; in SQL I do the following (SQL_1):

SELECT t1.* FROM log_entry AS t1 
LEFT OUTER JOIN log_entry t2 
on t1.document_id = t2.document_id AND t1.date < t2.date 
WHERE t2.date IS NULL

Then in my service I have a function like this:

List<LogEntry> logs(){
    LogEntry.withSession {Session session ->
        def query =  session.createSQLQuery(
                """SELECT t1.* FROM log_entry AS t1 
                    LEFT OUTER JOIN log_entry t2 
                    on t1.document_id = t2.document_id AND t1.date < t2.date 
                    WHERE t2.date IS NULL"""
        )
        def results = query.with {
            addEntity(LogEntry)
            list()
        }
        return results
    }
}

The SQL query does solve my problem, at least in a way. I need to also paginate, filter and sort my results as well as join the tables LogEntry, Document and File. Altough it is doable in SQL it might get complicated quite quickly.

In other project I´ve used criteriaQuery similar to the following:

Criteria criteria = LogEntry.createCriteria()
criteria.list(params){ //Max, Offset, Sort, Order
    fetchMode 'document', FetchMode.JOIN //THE JOIN PART
    fetchMode 'document.file', FetchMode.JOIN //THE JOIN PART

    createAlias("document","_document") //Alias could be an option but I would need to add transients, since it seems to need an association path, and even then I am not so sure

    if(params.filter){ //Filters
        if(params.filter.name){
            eq('name', filter.name)
        }
    }
}

In these kinds of criteria I´ve been able to add custom filters, etc. But I have no Idea how to translate my query(SQL_1) into a criteria. Is there a way to accomplish this with criteriaBuilders or should I stick to sql?

Oleta