Relate entries that have the same id automatically

Hi EE enthousiasts,

I need some advise on the following matter. I’m working on a gallery website with a lot of art by lots of artists. Visitors can find info about the artist, their work, and in may have the possibility to reserve a certain piece of art which they want to buy or rent.

The data is already available as xml. I have 3 xml files:

artists.xml artrwork.xml reservations.xml

I’ve found a very easy way to import those databases into EE through the DataGrab module. That works just perfectly. However, I can’t figure out a fast, easy solution to connect artists from artists.xml to specific artwork in artwork.xml

I thought about EE relationships or playa, but for as far I know, relationships have to be set manually. Since there are many artist and many different artworks this would take a long time to accomplish. Next to that, the XML-files will be updated daily.

I feel the solution lies into the unique number every artist has. This number can be found into all the XML-files.

Example Nodes in artist.xml

<row>
<artistNumber>15006</artistNumber>
<artistName>004</artistName>
etc. etc.
</row>

Example Nodes in artwork.xml

<row>
<artistNumber>15006</artistNumber>
<artWork>lovelyArt001</artWork>
</row>
<row>
<artistNumber>15006</artistNumber>
<artWork> lovelyArt002</artWork>
</row>
<row>
<artistNumber>15008</artistNumber>
<artWork> otherLovelyArtFromOtherArtist001</artWork>
</row>
etc. etc.

How can I connect a specific artist to another without doing this manually? I hope you understand my problem (not native English speaker) if there are any questions, feel free to ask them.

I hope anyone can help me out!

Thanks, Jef

[Mod Edit: Moved to the Development & Programming forum]