A business rule can apply to a feature type in one of two ways. It is either a structural rule or a flow rule. Structural rules specify physical associations between features. For example, a structural rule is one that requires a transformer to be attached to a pole. Flow rules associate features to represent network connectivity and thus support flow modeling and other types of engineering analysis. A flow rule, for example, requires a transformer to be connected to a primary conductor. Bentley Utilities Designer breaks down the different kinds of business rules into simpler pieces called components. A feature type may have only one rule component (e.g., a Pole feature type usually has at least one structural rule but no flow rules). Some feature types may not have any rules.

Another type of rule component, Propagation, determines how connectivity attributes such as phase and voltage are passed down from existing features to new assigned features. A Propagation rule component allows the default attribute values of the feature type to be overwritten by the corresponding attribute values of a connected feature.