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
{
			value = StylePropertyMapping.getDefaultValue( name );
			nonInheritableReportStyle.setCssText( index, value == null
					? null
					: value.toString( ) );
		}
	}
	/**
	 * Creates Report default styles
	 */
	protected void createReportDefaultStyles( StyleHandle handle )
	{
		nonInheritableReportStyle = new StyleDeclaration( cssEngine );
		inheritableReportStyle = new StyleDeclaration( cssEngine );
		
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.BACKGROUND_COLOR_PROP, handle,
				true );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.BACKGROUND_IMAGE_PROP, handle );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.BACKGROUND_POSITION_X_PROP, handle );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.BACKGROUND_POSITION_Y_PROP, handle );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.BACKGROUND_REPEAT_PROP, handle );
		
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.TEXT_ALIGN_PROP, handle );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.TEXT_INDENT_PROP, handle );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.LETTER_SPACING_PROP, handle );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.LINE_HEIGHT_PROP, handle );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.ORPHANS_PROP, handle );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.TEXT_TRANSFORM_PROP, handle );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.VERTICAL_ALIGN_PROP, handle );
		addReportDefaultPropertyValue( Style.WHITE_SPACE_PROP, handle );