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
*            page object
	 * @param handle
	 *            page handle
	 */
	private void setupMasterPage( MasterPageDesign page, MasterPageHandle handle )
	{
		setupStyledElement( page, handle );
		String styleName = setupBodyStyle( page );
		if (styleName != null)
		{
			page.setBodyStyleName( styleName );
		}
		page.setPageType( handle.getPageType( ) );
		
		DimensionValue effectWidth = handle.getEffectiveWidth( );
		DimensionValue effectHeight = handle.getEffectiveHeight( );
		DimensionType width = null;
		DimensionType height = null;
		if ( effectWidth != null )
		{
			width = new DimensionType( effectWidth.getMeasure( ), effectWidth
					.getUnits( ) );
		}
		if ( effectHeight != null )
		{
			height = new DimensionType( effectHeight.getMeasure( ),
					effectHeight.getUnits( ) );
		}
		page.setPageSize( width, height );
		page.setOrientation( handle.getOrientation( ) );