Haystack 2.2.4

Added the apply_filter_policy function to standardize the application of filter policies across all document store-specific retrievers, allowing for consistent handling of initial and runtime filters based on the chosen policy (replace or merge).
Introduced a ‘filter_policy’ init parameter for both InMemoryBM25Retriever and InMemoryEmbeddingRetriever, allowing users to define how runtime filters should be applied with options to either ‘replace’ the initial filters or ‘merge’ them, providing greater flexibility in filtering query results.

Meta handling of bytestreams in Azure OCR has been fixed.
Fix some bugs running a Pipeline that has Components with conditional outputs. Some branches that were expected not to run would run anyway, even if they received no inputs. Some branches instead would cause the Pipeline to get stuck waiting to run that branch, even if they received no inputs. The behaviour would depend whether the Component not receiving the input has a optional input or not.