Grouping textInput box in shiny

Question

I am working on creating an app using shiny that processes user input data and calculates a certain patient statistics and later renders the result values. I have pasted a dummy snippet of my ui.R code below. I am trying to find a way to group the textInput boxes by patient visits. Is there a way to group the textInput boxes, such that each line will represent a separate patient visit with textInput boxes aligned side by side?

I am hoping to display the textInput boxes as:

Visit1
[ BMI1 textbox ] [cholesterol 1 textbox] [Heart Rate 1 textbox]

Visit2

[ BMI2 textbox ] [cholesterol 2 textbox] [Heart Rate 2 textbox]

      ui <- fluidPage(# App title ----
            titlePanel("Dummy Patient Analysis"),

            # Sidebar layout with input and output definitions ----
            sidebarLayout(
              sidebarPanel(

               #### Visit 1 #######
                textInput(
                  inputId = "bmi1",
                  label = "BMI1",
                  value = 2
                ),
                textInput(
                  inputId = "chol1",
                  label = "cholesterol 1",
                  value = 5
                ),
                textInput(
                  inputId = "heart_rate1",
                  label = "Heart Rate",
                  value = 40
                ),

                #### Visit 2 #######
                textInput(
                  inputId = "bmi2",
                  label = "BMI2",
                  value = 2
                ),
                textInput(
                  inputId = "chol2",
                  label = "cholesterol 2",
                  value = 7
                ),
                textInput(
                  inputId = "heart_rate2",
                  label = "Heart Rate",
                  value = 42
                ),

                actionButton("process", "Estimate")
              ),
            mainPanel(
              tableOutput("view"),
              verbatimTextOutput("summary")
            )
       )
   )

Answer 1

splitLayout is designed to do exactly this kind of thing with minimal effort. Just wrap each set of inputs you want side-by-side with splitLayout() to achieve what you're looking for, like so:

library(shiny)
ui <- fluidPage(
  titlePanel("Dummy Patient Analysis"),
  sidebarLayout(
    sidebarPanel(
      splitLayout(
        textInput(inputId = "bmi1", label = "BMI1", value = 2),
        textInput(inputId = "chol1", label = "cholesterol 1", value = 5),
        textInput(inputId = "heart_rate1", label = "Heart Rate", value = 40)
      ),
      splitLayout(
        textInput(inputId = "bmi2", label = "BMI2", value = 2),
        textInput(inputId = "chol2", label = "cholesterol 2", value = 7),
        textInput(inputId = "heart_rate2", label = "Heart Rate", value = 42)
      ),      
      actionButton("process", "Estimate")
    ),
    mainPanel(
      tableOutput("view"),
      verbatimTextOutput("summary")
    )
  )
)
server <- function(input, output) {}
shinyApp(ui, server)

If you don't want the boxes to take up the entire sidebar, you can also supply splitLayout with a vector that defines cell widths (see help page ).