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
while ( visibilityRulesIterator.hasNext( ) )
			{
				VisibilityRuleDesign hide = createHide( (HideRuleHandle) visibilityRulesIterator
						.next( ) );
				visibility.addRule( hide );
			}
			if ( visibility.count( ) == 0 )
			{
				return null;
			}
			return visibility;
		}
		return null;
	}
	/**
	 * Creates the visibility rule( i.e. the hide)
	 * 
	 * @param handle
	 *            the DE's handle
	 * @return the created visibility rule
	 */
	protected VisibilityRuleDesign createHide( HideRuleHandle handle )
	{
		VisibilityRuleDesign rule = new VisibilityRuleDesign( );
		rule.setExpression( createExpression( handle.getExpression( ) ) );
		rule.setFormat( handle.getFormat( ) );
		return rule;
	}
	/**
	 * setup the attribute of report item