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
TableItemDesign table = new TableItemDesign( );
		table.setRepeatHeader( handle.repeatHeader( ) );
		setupListingItem( table, handle );
		
		String caption = handle.getCaption( );
		String captionKey = handle.getCaptionKey( );
		if ( caption != null || captionKey != null )
		{
			table.setCaption( captionKey, caption );
		}
		
		SlotHandle columnSlot = handle.getColumns( );
		for ( int i = 0; i < columnSlot.getCount( ); i++ )
		{
			ColumnHandle columnHandle = (ColumnHandle) columnSlot.get( i );
			apply( columnHandle );
			if ( currentElement != null )
			{
				ColumnDesign columnDesign = (ColumnDesign) currentElement;
				for ( int j = 0; j < columnHandle.getRepeatCount( ); j++ )
				{
					table.addColumn( columnDesign );
				}
			}
		}
		
		SlotHandle headerSlot = handle.getHeader( );
		TableBandDesign header = createTableBand( headerSlot );
		table.setHeader( header );