Testing access control with cucumber & capybara - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

I'm using rails_admin and devise in my rails 3 application and writing tests for access control in cucumber.
I want to test that someone not admin cannot access all the routes of rails_admin (for example)
If I explicitly test like so:
Scenario: An authenticated user cannot access site administration
Given I am an authenticated user "kate", "kate#example.com"
When I visit the administration page
Then I should see access denied
I can match the string "the administration page" to the route "rails_admin_dashboard_path" and make my test pass just fine. But this seems to be testing the application the wrong way around. I want to test ALL the routes (loop through them somehow) rather than imply them and maybe miss one or two.
Something like this:
Scenario: An authenticated user cannot access site administration
Given I am an authenticated user "kate", "kate#example.com"
When I visit ANY administration page
Then I should see access denied
Could anyone advise me on how to effectively test this? Am I taking the right approach? Should I be doing this in rspec instead?
As you might be able to tell, I am a bit of a n00b.

Answer 1

I don't think you should be aiming to test every possible route in your Cucumber scenarios. As Andrea S. suggests, if all your admin controllers have a common base, then it should be sufficient to check the admin home page.

Answer 2

One approach would be to create a base controller in your admin namespace that all other admin/controllers inherit from. You can put a before filter in that base controller to check for admin authentication. Like so:
#app/controllers/admin/base.rb
class Admin::Base < ApplicationController
before_filter :ensure_admin_logged_in
end
And have all your other controllers in the admin namespace inherit from this one:
#app/controllers/admin/Pages.rb
class Admin::PagesController < Admin::Base
layout "admin"
end