XFM allows a feature to have its symbology determined by the value of properties stored in the feature for improved accuracy. In legacy projects, for example, modeling a 200 mm pipe in red and a 300 mm pipe in green required separate features. In XFM, the color of a feature can be based on its properties. For example, if a feature, Road, has a property Type, 2-Lane, the color value is 3. If Type is 4-Lane, the color value is 5. If Type is another value, the color value is 1, the default. A common practice for symbology is to set the default value with no criteria as the last defined entry.

Bentley Geospatial Administrator allows commonly used criteria to be assigned a name and stored in the XML metadata. When specifying criteria, the name may be used in place of the actual expression. Using named criteria ensures the feature's property type is checked. Any criteria defined in a property based symbology (PBS) rule should be limited to feature-based criteria since operation properties are not guaranteed to exist when the PBS rule is evaluated.

If the criteria is only used for a single feature, the feature_instance_alias part of the property name can be excluded. For example, if the Road feature's named criteria is road_2lane, it is defined as COMPARE("[Road:Type]","2-Lane",). If the criteria is only used for the Road feature, it could also be defined as COMPARE("[Type]","2-Lane",). See "Criteria" for more information.