Zoho Inventory: getRecords OR query

Zoho Inventory: getRecords OR query

Has anyone discovered a way to perform a query to the Inventory getRecords api in Deluge that accepts multiple optional value for a field.

To put this in context:
We are attempting to get Inventory items by Category and are currently doing something like this:
  1. query = Map();
  2. category_id = thisapp.functionThatResolvesThisForUs();
  3. ...
  4. query.put("category_id", category_id);
  5. ...
  6. inventory_response = zoho.inventory.getRecords("Items",thisapp.getOrgId(),query,"zoho_inventory");
For singular categories, this functions as expected and we do not have a problem. Our problem occurs when we want to fetch all the items in multiple categories at once. We cannot use the following as any subsequent uses of query.put("category_id",some_id) overwrites the first key/value pair and we only end up searching for the last.


We also attempted to write a criteria field that looked like "query.put("criteria", "(category_id:equals:12345)or(category_id:equals:67890))" in the hope that it would be consumed like the criteria parameter on the Search Records API but this isn't filtering anything so our educated guess is that it doesn't match any accepted filter the query and is being ignored.


Anyone found a way around this or do we need to set up further api calls to handle each category individually and then merge the results, maybe?
We'll do that if necessarily but it would be shame as it may well add up to more api calls overall and us burning through allocation for the sake of no way to perform an OR query.