Ya the main thing is I wanted a condition but it needed to be in parentheses before hand. I am making my code build complex sql queries and I needed the parentheses for one function that returns a condition. It is hard to explain but the main thing I am missing is something that I can use to put parentheses around a condition.
the condition that gets returned get passed in
countselectconditionstep =
countselectconditionstep.and(searchfilter(querytags).or(hiddenkeystringfilter));
