Semantics of "Owner" in IdentityLinkType

Flowable Engine
1

The identity link types are defined in
public class IdentityLinkType {
/* Flowable native roles */
public static final String ASSIGNEE = “assignee”;
public static final String CANDIDATE = “candidate”;
public static final String OWNER = “owner”;
public static final String STARTER = “starter”;
public static final String PARTICIPANT = “participant”;
}

User Task documentation describes in detail purpose and differences between assignee, candidate users, and candidate groups: https://flowable.com/open-source/docs/bpmn/ch07b-BPMN-Constructs/#user-assignment

I was able to find definition of participant here: https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine/issues/133
“Every assignee of a task will be added as participant for the process instance by default”

However, I cannot find what is owner, how to set it, and what is the semantics of it.
Owner is shown in flowable-admin and visible in various REST responses, so it seems that it has certain importance that I am missing.
(There is a similar question about owners from 2018 about it, but it was not answered: Task Owner : How can we set an owner to a Task?)

2

I’ve come across task owners being mentioned in the Javadoc. It seems to be related to task delegation.

See https://flowable.com/open-source/docs/javadocs/org/flowable/engine/TaskService.html#delegateTask-java.lang.String-java.lang.String-
and https://flowable.com/open-source/docs/javadocs/org/flowable/engine/TaskService.html#resolveTask-java.lang.String-

Unfortunately I have never used it myself, or seen any other documentation regarding how it works.

3

Flowable doesn’t do much with the owner, it’s metadata you can use in your own applications. As @pstapleton correctly points out, the exceptions are indeed the delegate/resolve task methods.