Undefined owner in token balances structure even though there's an owner

Question

When calling getParsedTransaction, in the tokenBalances here I get an undefined owner even though the token account has an owner?

Here is example

getting the transaction info for 4XiDd3MBPd3cfNacyxCecx5SaJu6KNCtzUQcQSVqYM3bsMHvGYaM65iZ34RLaAsQXCVzzH7C2Wftnbv1dXM1WuKY

in postTokenBalances I get

accountIndex: 2
mint: "Ar3T1wiyJREhuRVb4FdXCuEFCZECGpfhUCYiZT4Hv2GT"
owner: undefined

Answer 1

Those fields were not present in the tokenBalances maps when we started saving that metadata into the foundation BigTable storage. The change that started storing the owner field landed in master on October 13, 2021, and the change that started storing the programId field landed on master on April 20, 2022. In both cases, it would have taken some additional time for those features to be rolled out on mainnet-beta.

Your example transaction was processed Sept 27, 2021, before both changes.