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
if ( style.isEmpty( ) )
		{
			return null;
		}
		rule.setStyle( style );
		ConditionalExpression condExpr = new ConditionalExpression( rule
				.getTestExpression( ),
				toDteFilterOperator( rule.getOperator( ) ), rule.getValue1( ),
				rule.getValue2( ) );
		rule.setConditionExpr( condExpr );
		return rule;
	}
	/**
	 * create highlight defined in the handle.
	 * 
	 * @param item
	 *            styled item.
	 */
	protected void setHighlight( StyledElementDesign item, String defaultStr )
	{
		StyleHandle handle = item.getHandle( ).getPrivateStyle( );
		if ( handle == null )
		{
			return;
		}
		
		Iterator iter = handle.highlightRulesIterator( );
		if ( iter == null )
		{
			return;