A quick tour of tool layers

A tool layer is a special kind of group layer that has a geoprocessing tool associated with it. You can right-click a tool layer and click Open to open the tool's dialog box. After entering parameters in the dialog box and executing the tool, all outputs from the tool will be added as sublayers beneath the tool layer. The name of the sublayer is the parameter name as found in the tool dialog box.

Legacy:

The capability to create a tool layer was removed at version 10.1. Tool layers in ArcMap documents created prior to version 10.1 can still be used in 10.1.

Prior to version 10.1, tool layers were a prerequisite for authoring and publishing geoprocessing services. At version 10.1, you no longer need tool layers to author and publish geoprocessing services. To create geoprocessing services at 10.1, you publish a geoprocessing result found in the Results window.