Bug 102511 Enhance Highlighting to support Banding
Using the highlight feature to create a banded report results in a messy report. To recreate, create a simple tabular report. In the designer, select the detail row, go to the Highlights tab on the Property Editor view. Add a new highlight, set its condition to be "row[0] % 2" "Equals" "0". Set the formatting for the highlight to have a gray background color. When the report is previewed, alternating rows have a background color for each cell. The issue is that the backgrounds for the cells are not contiguous, there are spaces between each cell's background, and if a cell has a null value there is no background color. In this situation the highlight should apply to the row, instead it is being applied to each cell. If I manually set the background of a detail row to be gray I get the effect I want.
engine/org.eclipse.birt.report.engine/src/org/eclipse/birt/report/engine/data/dte/ReportQueryBuilder.java
DesignChoiceConstants.SORT_DIRECTION_ASC ) ? 0 : 1 );
			return sort;
		}
		/**
		 * create all sort conditions given a sort key handle iterator
		 * 
		 * @param iter
		 *            the iterator
		 * @return sort array
		 */
		private ArrayList createSorts( Iterator iter )
		{
			ArrayList sorts = new ArrayList( );
			if ( iter != null )
			{
				while ( iter.hasNext( ) )
				{
					SortKeyHandle handle = (SortKeyHandle) iter.next( );
					sorts.add( createSort( handle ) );
				}
			}
			return sorts;
		}
		/**
		 * create all sort conditions in a listing element
		 * 
		 * @param listing
		 *            ListingDesign
		 * @return the sort array
		 */