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/data/dte/ReportQueryBuilder.java
if ( masterPage != null )
				{
					SimpleMasterPageDesign pageDesign = (SimpleMasterPageDesign) masterPage;
					for ( int j = 0; j < pageDesign.getHeaderCount( ); j++ )
					{
						pageDesign.getHeader( j ).accept( this, null );
					}
					for ( int j = 0; j < pageDesign.getFooterCount( ); j++ )
					{
						pageDesign.getFooter( j ).accept( this, null );
					}
				}
			}
			
			
			for ( int i = 0; i < report.getContentCount( ); i++ )
				report.getContent( i ).accept( this, null );
		}
		/**
		 * Handles query creation and initialization with report-item related
		 * expressions
		 * 
		 * @param item
		 *            report item
		 */
		private BaseQueryDefinition prepareVisit( ReportItemDesign item )
		{
			BaseQueryDefinition tempQuery = null;
			if ( item instanceof ListingDesign )
				tempQuery = createQuery( (ListingDesign) item );