Not obvious to me at first is that Foxy Fixtures in RoR, where you can specify a foreign key relationship by name, as in:

### in pirates.yml reginald: name: Reginald the Pirate monkey: george ### in monkeys.yml george: name: George the Monkey pirate: reginald

Depends upon the fact that you didn’t include id: in the fixtures. That is, RoR is not looking into the pirates.yml file to find the “reginald” fixture, and then inserting the “id” from it in.

Rather, it’s applying a hash of the string “reginald” to get the id, and so the id: of reginald had better be derived in the same way.