only bitmaps will tile automatically - as far as I know

what I was thinking of was not using the fill tool - just clipview

if you make the shape you want to fill the clipping shape, you can resize the shape inside, but if you want it to tile you would need to set that up manually - it's not ideal I will grant if you want to update, you don't say which version of xara you are using, if it is designer pro 7 then 'live copies' might help, but I don't have the pro 7 version to try it out