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
*         return the default value
		 */
		protected String getLocalizedString( String resourceKey, String text )
		{
			if ( resourceKey == null )
			{
				return text;
			}
			String ret = report.getMessage( resourceKey, context.getLocale( ) );
			if ( ret == null )
			{
				logger.log( Level.SEVERE, "get resource error, resource key:" 
						+ resourceKey + " Locale:" 
						+ context.getLocale( ).toString( ) );
				return text;
			}
			return ret;
		}
		/**
		 * Walk through the DOM tree from a text item to collect the embedded
		 * expressions and format expressions
		 * 
		 * After evaluating, the second child node of the embedded expression
		 * node holds the value if no error exists.
		 * 
		 * @param node
		 *            a node in the DOM tree
		 * @param text
		 *            the text object
		 */