Using @properties with fields—recommended approach?

[tiltowait]

I'm migrating to beanie from a different ODM. Here's an extremely simplified view of one of my models:

from beanie import Document
from pydantic import Field


class Character(Document):
    name: str
    _humanity: int = Field(alias="humanity")
    
    @property
    def humanity(self):
        return self._humanity
    
    @humanity.setter
    def humanity(self, new_humanity):
        self._humanity = max(0, min(new_humanity, 10))

This does not work in beanie, however, as beanie seems to ignore private attributes (_humanity) when writing to the database. "All right", I thought, "I'll just change the name."

However, if I do that (say, _humanity -> raw_humanity), then print(character.humanity) works, but character.humanity = 5 raises a ValueError from pydantic stating that Character objects have no field "humanity".

I could fix this by changing the name of the @property, but that would require lots of code changes elsewhere. I'd like to avoid that if possible.

I also found an approach using @root_validator, but that has its own pitfalls and issues.

What is my best approach here?