Getting Database connection in pure JPA setup

We have a JPA application (using hibernate) and we need to pass a call to a legacy reporting tool that needs a JDBC database connection as a parameter. Is there a simple way to get access to the JDBC connection hibernate has setup?

As per the hibernate docs here,

Connection connection()

Deprecated. (scheduled for removal in 4.x). Replacement depends on need; for doing direct JDBC stuff use doWork(org.hibernate.jdbc.Work) ...

Use Hibernate Work API instead:

Session session = entityManager.unwrap(Session.class);
session.doWork(new Work() {

    @Override
    public void execute(Connection connection) throws SQLException {
        // do whatever you need to do with the connection
    }
});

Where you want to get that connection is unclear. One possibility would be to get it from the underlying Hibernate Session used by the EntityManager. With JPA 1.0, you'll have to do something like this:

Session session = (Session)em.getDelegate();
Connection conn = session.connection();

Note that the getDelegate() is not portable, the result of this method is implementation specific: the above code works in JBoss, for GlassFish you'd have to adapt it - have a look at Be careful while using EntityManager.getDelegate().

In JPA 2.0, things are a bit better and you can do the following:

Connection conn = em.unwrap(Session.class).connection();

If you are running inside a container, you could also perform a lookup on the configured DataSource.