I've read through the hibernate 4 migration guide, and noted the removal of Session.connection() for obtaining JDBC Connection instance. According to the migration guide, I should instead be using Session.doWork() or Session.connectionWithOptions(), but neither of these approaches gives me direct access to a JDBC Connection instance.

I understand the design principle behind removing direction access to the managed JDBC Connections. I believe that the 'right' approach for my application (we use the JasperReports reporting engine, which requires a JBDC Connection object when invoking the API) would be to access the c3p0 connection pool directly. Our application would get a Connection instance from c3p0 and then release that connection back to the pool upon completion of the work.

Is that the 'best practice' in the Hibernate 4.x world?

Just for the record, here is the solution that I have implemented in my Hibernate 4 testing branch: