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/parser/EngineIRVisitor.java
FreeFormItemDesign container = new FreeFormItemDesign( );
		setupReportItem( container, handle );
		
		SlotHandle slot = handle.getReportItems( );
		for ( int i = 0; i < slot.getCount( ); i++ )
		{
			apply( slot.get( i ) );
			if ( currentElement != null )
			{
				container.addItem( (ReportItemDesign) currentElement );
			}
		}
		currentElement = container;
	}
	public void visitTextDataItem( TextDataHandle handle )
	{
		MultiLineItemDesign multiLineItem = new MultiLineItemDesign( );
		setupReportItem( multiLineItem, handle );
		String valueExpr = handle.getValueExpr( );
		String contentType = handle.getContentType( );
		multiLineItem.setContent( createExpression( valueExpr ) );
		multiLineItem.setContentType( contentType );
		setHighlight( multiLineItem, valueExpr );
		setMap( multiLineItem, valueExpr );
		currentElement = multiLineItem;
	}
	public void visitParameterGroup( ParameterGroupHandle handle )
	{
		ParameterGroupDefn paramGroup = new ParameterGroupDefn( );