One key configuration point you might need to hook into is when you're using an abstract class (or an interface) in your domain model. Jackson won't know by default what implementation to create for an interface. Take the following example:

@Entity
public class MyEntity {
  @OneToMany
  private List<MyInterface> interfaces;
}

In a default configuration, Jackson has no idea what class to instantiate when POSTing new data to the exporter. This is something you'll need to tell Jackson either through an annotation, or, more cleanly, by registering a type mapping using a Module.

To add your own Jackson configuration to the ObjectMapper used by Spring Data REST, override the configureJacksonObjectMapper method. That method will be passed an ObjectMapper instance that has a special module to handle serializing and deserializing PersistentEntitys. You can register your own modules as well, like in the following example.

  @Override protected void configureJacksonObjectMapper(ObjectMapper objectMapper) {
    objectMapper.registerModule(new SimpleModule("MyCustomModule"){
      @Override public void setupModule(SetupContext context) {
        context.addAbstractTypeResolver(
          new SimpleAbstractTypeResolver().addMapping(MyInterface.class,
                                                      MyInterfaceImpl.class)
        );
      }
    });
  }

Once you have access to the SetupContext object in your Module, you can do all sorts of cool things to configure Jacskon's JSON mapping. You can read more about how Modules work on Jackson's wiki: http://wiki.fasterxml.com/JacksonFeatureModules

If you want to (de)serialize a domain type in a special way, you can register your own implementations with Jackson's ObjectMapper and the Spring Data REST exporter will transparently handle those domain objects correctly. To add serializers, from your setupModule method implementation, do something like the following:

@Override public void setupModule(SetupContext context) {
  SimpleSerializers serializers = new SimpleSerializers();
  SimpleDeserializers deserializers = new SimpleDeserializers();

  serializers.addSerializer(MyEntity.class, new MyEntitySerializer());
  deserializers.addDeserializer(MyEntity.class, new MyEntityDeserializer());

  context.addSerializers(serializers);
  context.addDeserializers(deserializers);
}