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
if ( DesignChoiceConstants.INTERVAL_PREFIX.equals( interval ) )
			{
				return IGroupDefinition.STRING_PREFIX_INTERVAL;
			}
			if ( DesignChoiceConstants.INTERVAL_SECOND.equals( interval ) )
			{
				return IGroupDefinition.SECOND_INTERVAL;
			}
			if ( DesignChoiceConstants.INTERVAL_INTERVAL.equals( interval ) )
			{
				return IGroupDefinition.NUMERIC_INTERVAL;
			}
			return IGroupDefinition.NO_INTERVAL;
		}
		/**
		 * @param direction
		 *            "asc" or "desc" string
		 * @return integer value defined in <code>ISortDefn</code>
		 */
		protected int parseSortDirection( String direction )
		{
			if ( "asc".equals( direction ) ) 
				return ISortDefinition.SORT_ASC;
			if ( "desc".equals( direction ) ) 
				return ISortDefinition.SORT_DESC;
			assert false;
			return 0;
		}
	}
}