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
*            The <code>StyleDeclaration</code> object.
	 * @return the name of the style.
	 */
	private String assignStyleName( StyleDeclaration style )
	{
		if ( style == null || style.isEmpty( ) )
		{
			return null;
		}
		
		for ( int i = 0; i < report.getStyleCount( ); i++ )
		{
			
			StyleDeclaration cachedStyle = (StyleDeclaration) report
					.getStyle( i );
			if ( cachedStyle.equals( style ) )
			{
				
				
				style = cachedStyle;
				return Report.PREFIX_STYLE_NAME + i;
			}
		}
		
		
		
		String styleName = Report.PREFIX_STYLE_NAME + report.getStyleCount( );
		report.addStyle( styleName, style );
		return styleName;
	}