Is there anyway to refer to the entities being linked in a foreign key field of a fixture by name instead of id? Ie, if I have categories.yml some_cat: id: 1 name: Foo other_cat: id: 2 name: Bar data.yml some_item: id: 1 category_id: <%= categories(:some_cat).id %> name: Hello World The above doesn''t work due to scope, even if the fixtures are loaded in the proper order. But I think it illustrates what I''d like to do. If the objects in my fixtures have "good" names, then I''d rather use them when defining objects that use them -- I can remember the names much better than I can remember the arbitrary numbers. I was able to get something of the form: data.yml some_item: id: 1 category_id: <%= (Category.find_by_name "Foo").id %> name: Hello World to work, but that''s adding an extra query to the overhead of establishing the fixture. I can probably take that hit on the small project I''m working on now, but on other projects it would probably force me to run smaller suites than I''d like. Is there a better way? Eric