I was finally able to figure this out and wanted to share it with the community in case someone else could use it.

The reason for this need was I found myself having to repeat a lot of the same code for interacting with different models. The function I created now allows me to pass a list of conditions to a function and perform various checks, changes, and calls in a reusable function. This allowed me to eliminate over 100 lines of codes.

The only caveat I was not able to control the order of the criteria in the dictionary so I could not figure out how to easily pass an "OR" condition such as "['active','=',True],'|',['active','=',False]". Adding the active conditions caused the whole XMLRPC search to break because it changed the order of the criteria to be ordered alphabetically instead of the order I added it to the dictionary. If anyone has a solution for this please let me know.

FIRST CREATE THE DICTIONARY WITH THE DESIRED CRITERIA

search_conditions = {'someField':True,'type': 'default'} 

ITERATE THROUGH DICTIONARY TO CREATE LIST OF TUPLES TO BE USED WITH XML RPC 

        for k,v in search_conditions.items():
            name = k
            val = v 
            condition = [name,'=',val]              
            condition = va
            conditions.append(condition)   

EXECUTE XMLRPC SEARCH

sock.execute(dbname, uid, pwd, model, 'search', conditions)