A Bentley article that talks about components not getting updated with Spec Gen and how the sysId plays into this. It is a great discussion about how sysId’s are generated used and how they affect things. There are links that take the discussion further and show more insight in how Bentley’s system was created in order to do customization.

Before I gave some catalogs to the Spec Integration team, I had to regenerate the system IDs. WHat happens if you don’t? It deletes the duplicates – so poof – a whole bunch of specs could disappear on a copy/paste. So it is important to change a column that affects the SYS id which is listed in the MDB file under the DefaultSysIDs table. Note that Short in once counted and Long Descriptions on both did not count. Use the tool under the File Menu of the Specification Generator to randomize these values for you. It can be run on Catalogs and/or Specs at the same time.