v2026.5.12

Released 2026-05-12. Absorb DLM's contracts — one-way migration Job + opt-in nav hide.

What changed

Two pieces of operator-visible functionality build on the Phase 18 coexistence fix:

1. A new Job: MigrateContractLCMToContract (under Apps → Jobs → Contracts) copies every ContractLCM row from nautobot-app-device-lifecycle-mgmt into our Contract model. Idempotent and one-way.
2. An opt-in PLUGINS_CONFIG flag: hide_dlm_contracts_nav removes DLM's Contracts group from the Device Lifecycle sidebar so operators see one canonical contracts surface — ours.

DLM's data, URLs, REST API, and other nav groups (Hardware Notices, Software Lifecycle, Reports) remain untouched.

Why

After Phase 18 unblocked coexistence, operators with both plugins installed still saw two parallel "Contracts" surfaces in the same Nautobot. DLM's ContractLCM is structurally a subset of our Contract (no recurring/billing-period, no SLA fields, no auto_renew/notice_period); DLM's own DLMToNautobotCoreModelMigration Job explicitly skips ContractLCM because Nautobot core has no Contract destination. We fill that gap — our plugin is the natural destination DLM never had.

How

Field mapping

ContractLCM → Contract:

DLM field	Our field	Notes
name	name	direct
provider (ProviderLCM)	provider (ServiceProvider)	matched by name; auto-created with the default by_name strategy
status (StatusField)	status (StatusField)	falls back to "Active" if DLM's status isn't valid for our Contract
number	contract_number	direct
start	start_date	direct
end	end_date	direct
cost	recurring_cost	interpreted per the default_billing_period Job var (default Monthly)
currency	currency	direct; default USD if blank
support_level (free-text)	coverage_hours + response_time (enums)	best-effort regex match — see below
contract_type (free-text)	contract_type (enum)	best-effort regex match
devices (M2M)	ContractAssignment rows	one per device, content_type=dcim.Device
comments	comments	direct

Best-effort free-text → enum mapping

DLM stores support_level and contract_type as free strings. We have enums. The Job runs a regex pass and warns-and-leaves-blank when no pattern matches:

• "24x7 with 4-hour response" → coverage_hours="24x7", response_time="4h"
• "8x5xNBD" → coverage_hours="8x5_nbd", response_time="nbd"
• "Hardware Maintenance" → contract_type="hardware"
• "Premium Gold Tier" → leaves both blank, logs a warning per row

Operators review the Job's warning log entries and manually fix unmappable rows in our UI afterward.

Idempotency

Each successfully-migrated ContractLCM gets stamped with a Nautobot custom field migrated_to_contract_models=True. Re-running the Job excludes already-stamped rows. The same pattern DLM's own model_migration.py uses for its migrated_to_core_model_flag.

One-way

Source ContractLCM rows are stamped but not deleted. Operators delete from DLM's UI when comfortable.

Job variables

Variable	Default	Meaning
dry_run	True	Log planned actions without writing. Run dry first to verify.
default_billing_period	Monthly	How to interpret DLM's flat cost field — recurring at this cadence.
provider_match_strategy	Match by name; create ServiceProvider if missing	Alternative: Match by name; skip the contract if no ServiceProvider matches.

Opt-in nav hide

In PLUGINS_CONFIG:

PLUGINS_CONFIG = {
    "nautobot_contract_models": {
        "hide_dlm_contracts_nav": True,  # default False
    },
}

When True and nautobot-app-device-lifecycle-mgmt is installed, our AppConfig.ready() connects a request_started signal that — on the first HTTP request after startup — surgically removes DLM's Contracts group from the Device Lifecycle nav tab. DLM's Hardware Notices, Software Lifecycle, and Reports groups survive.

We defer the removal to request_started rather than firing it directly from ready() because Django/Nautobot load plugins in INSTALLED_APPS order — if your plugin lists nautobot_contract_models before nautobot_device_lifecycle_mgmt, our ready() runs before DLM has registered its nav, and a direct removal would be a no-op. The lazy approach is robust regardless of PLUGINS ordering.

Upgrade path

Operators with both plugins installed:

pip install --upgrade nautobot-contract-models==2026.5.12
nautobot-server migrate
sudo systemctl restart nautobot nautobot-worker

Then in the UI:

1. Apps → Installed Apps → Jobs — find the new "Migrate ContractLCM → Contract" Job under the Contracts group; click Edit and check Enabled (Nautobot's job-permission default is disabled).
2. Run with dry_run=True first; inspect the JobLogEntries for the planned mapping and any [unmapped] warnings.
3. Run with dry_run=False to commit.
4. (Optional) Add "hide_dlm_contracts_nav": True to PLUGINS_CONFIG["nautobot_contract_models"] and restart nautobot — DLM's Contracts sidebar group disappears.

Breaking changes

None. The migration is opt-in (operator must enable the Job and run it). The nav hide is opt-in (operator must set the flag).

DLM keeps its DB, REST API, and other nav groups working as before. Existing scripts hitting DLM's /api/plugins/nautobot-device-lifecycle-mgmt/contract/... endpoints continue to work.

Out of scope (deferred)

• DLM's DeviceContractLCM template-content panel (the contracts table injected into Device detail). Even with nav hidden, operators may still see this panel. Suppressing template content cleanly requires monkey-patching DLM or asking DLM upstream.
• URL redirect middleware rewriting DLM's contract URLs to ours. Avoided because it would break DLM REST API consumers and external bookmarks.
• Two-way sync. One-way only — updates to our Contract do NOT propagate back to ContractLCM.
• Upstream PR on nautobot-app-device-lifecycle-mgmt adding a DISABLE_CONTRACTS_SURFACE flag — the right long-term answer; this release ships the pragmatic in-between.

Tests

98 passing (86 from 2026.5.11 plus 12 new across test_migration_job.py and test_nav_hide.py). New tests gate on apps.is_installed('nautobot_device_lifecycle_mgmt') — they run in the dev container (DLM pinned via dev image) and skip cleanly on a host that doesn't have DLM installed.