I'm loading data from XML into a Haskell data type, and I'd like to use Persistent to save it to a database. The examples from the Yesod book have you manually define a FooId field and create the relationships yourself from the bottom up. For example, "a person has many cars": blah blah [persistLowerCase| Person name String Car ownerId PersonId Eq name String |] This works well if you're responsible for creating every person/car manually. But what if the data are given to you? If I were to parse people from an XML file, the cars wouldn't have people_ids in them. Instead I'd get, blah blah [persistLowerCase| Person name String cars [Car] Car name String |] As long as the cars list contains another Persistent type, it seems like I should be able to insert a person and have it insert the cars, with proper foreign keys, automatically. Doing it manually isn't straight-forward because I can't add the "ownerId" field to my Car type and still expect to parse it from the XML (which has no such field). Any ideas? I'm not married to Persistent yet; I just want to read in some XML and save it to a database without having to specify the names and types in three places (preferred place: in Haskell). I don't care too much about the schema I get as long as it's relational.