Locking Asset Versions Prior to Rendering
In many pipelines it is considered desirable to lock all the assets used in a shot to specific versions prior to rendering. When an asset is locked, meta versions (or tags) are resolved to a fixed static version, represented by a number. This ensures that the same asset version is used for rendering all frames. Conventional ways of doing this include creating a look-up table to specify which explicit version of an asset to use for all asset references, or by supplying an additional date-stamp to use when resolving assets.
The FarmAPI is a mechanism that allows users to take charge of the submission of jobs to a render farm and the construction of a look up table might be implemented within this API. See the Farm API docs for how to write a Farm API plug-in.